By John Pranger

“It is a subject that makes me sick with horror...”
— Charles Darwin

Most medicines derive from a gigantic contradiction: governments require that they be tested on animals prior to continuing to clinical trials. But applying animal research data to humans is “a leap of faith”—not science-based. That is why each year tens of thousands of people get sick from legal pharmaceutical drugs and many of them die. And our diseases go uncured.

This requirement produces only two things: an accurate picture of the effects on lab animals of the test drug—positive or negative—and a legal safe haven for governments and drug companies when things go wrong. When drugs cause illness and death in humans and there’s an inquiry, all parties point to the copious animal testing as proof of due diligence. But the animal testing gives no scientific certitude whatsoever as to their effect on humans. Even those in favour of the animal model admit this. The most respected textbook teaching the animal research method, the Handbook of Laboratory Animal Science states: “Uncritical reliance on the results of animal tests can be dangerously misleading and has cost the health and lives of tens of thousands of humans, as in Ciba Geigy’s clioquinol scandal, the Opren disaster of Distra Products Ltd., or ICI’s Eraldin calamity.”

And human trials are still necessary. Those who say we test on animals to avoid testing on people are either mistaken or dissembling. Once animal studies are completed, all medications are evaluated on humans. The first people to take a new substance or test a therapy are being experimented on as surely as if they were guinea pigs locked in a laboratory. Because of species differences, all animal data is different and can’t predict human reaction. You can’t know what apples are like by studying oranges.

Ushering drugs to market through animal testing is treacherous. Legal drugs kill more people a year than all illegal drugs combined. An 1998 article from the Journal of the American Medical Association described a study that concluded that adverse reactions to medications are the fourth leading cause of death. Adverse drug reactions kill an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Americans and 10,000 to 20,000 Canadians every year. Some 15 percent of all hospital admissions are caused by adverse medication reactions, costing tens of billions of annually.

“Normally, animal experiments not only fail to contribute to the safety of medications, but they even have the opposite effect.” This observation of Kurt Fickentscher of the Pharmacological Institute of the University of Bonn, Germany, writing in the medical journal Diagnosen in 1980, points to only one of the problematic aspects of animal tests, namely that they not only fail to predict the bad effects of experimental drugs and therapies (false negatives), but that they keep good medications from the patients when they falsely predict side effects that actually don’t materialize in eventual clinical trials (false positives).

For an idea of just how helpful those medications might be, we have only to weigh the personal benefit of some common painkillers—drugs that demonstrate false positives in animals but that have obvious therapeutic value in the human being.

When you get a headache, would you reach for a pain medication of which a single dose is fatal to a cat, by way of kidney failure? Perhaps. That medication is acetaminophen, most commonly marketed as Tylenol. Worried about Tylenol? You might prefer aspirin. Today, 29 billion aspirin a year are sold in the United States and twice that number are sold worldwide. Aspirin is used not only for pain relief and fever reductions but also for the prevention of strokes and heart attacks and other illnesses. Aspirin causes birth defects in mice and rats and results in such serious blood abnormalities in cats that they can tolerate only 20 percent of the human dosage every third day. How about ibuprofen, which most people know as Advil or Motrin? Ibuprofen causes kidney failure in dogs, even at very low doses.

All medications in use today can cause a serious side effect in some animal. If researchers persevere, inculcating enough species with high enough dosages, illness will eventually result. Hence, if we truly withheld from the public any medications based on its negative impact on non-humans, we would have no medications today. This fact alone destroys any justification for continued animal testing.

The only truly accurate knowledge about the positive and negative effects of medications on humans is acquired through in vitro testing, computer modeling, epidemiology, clinical observation, and autopsy of humans. Today’s technology is making observation of the effects of compounds on human systems easier and easier. More extensive preclinical testing on human tissue, more extensive clinical trials, and mandatory postmarketing drug surveillance would offer the public much safer medications. These changes are long overdue and absolutely vital.

John Pranger is the director of communications for the Animal Defense & Anti-Vivisection Society of British Columbia.