Hey, PETA Activists: Feel Free To Decline Any Medical Treatment Based On Animal Testing
Meredith Waldman writes at Nature.com that PETA activists are grounding primate flights -- threatening the supply of research monkeys to Western labs:
Each year, thousands of macaques and other monkeys are flown into Europe and North America to supply academic and industrial research labs -- more than 18,000 to the United States in 2011 alone. But in a campaign that could affect scientists across the West, the few major air carriers that still transport non-human primates are coming under unprecedented pressure to halt the practice.One key route under threat is from China, which last year shipped more than 70% of the research primates sent to the United States (see 'Up in the air'). On 14 March, animal breeders in China met with officials of China Southern Airlines to implore them to resume flights into Los Angeles International Airport, the largest US port of entry for research primates. Last August, China Southern cancelled a shipment from Guangzhou of 80 crab-eating macaques (Macaca fascicularis) destined for Los Angeles, after a social media, e-mail and telephone campaign by pressure group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), based in Norfolk, Virginia. China Southern has not flown research primates into Los Angeles since then.
"This was part of our larger campaign to disrupt the flow of primates to US labs," says Justin Goodman, associate director of the laboratory investigations department at PETA in Washington DC.
...Breeding the animals in the United States instead would be problematic: infrastructure and labour costs are much higher than they are in Asia, and colonies are much more likely to become the targets of animal activists. And moving the animals by sea is a non-starter because of the deleterious effects of the six-week trans-Pacific journey on the animals' health.
...Tipu Aziz, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Oxford, UK, has used macaques to study Parkinson's disease. He believes that restricting transport of animals will not have the desired effect. "My gut feeling is that more and more scientists will go elsewhere to do primate research," he says. "I have no qualms about going abroad to do my work. There are quite a few countries that have good facilities: there are centres in India, Singapore, Malaysia, China."
Related editorial in Nature:
Scientists and their allies must, of course, continue to be open about the price animals pay in research. They must openly acknowledge, immediately correct and do everything they can to prevent lapses in the care of the animals in their charge. At the same time, scientists must make every effort to use lower animal, and non-animal, models where possible, as regulations already require. And alongside all of that, they must emphasize the tangible and compelling improvements to human life that animal research has made possible.Consider stroke, which affects some 795,000 people in the United States alone each year -- 1 person every 40 seconds -- at a cost in excess of US$40 billion. More than 1,000 experimental treatments aimed at protecting brains cells in acute stroke have been developed in cells and rodents; none has been effective in humans. So a possible advance in a paper published last month is significant (D. J. Cook et al. Nature 483, 213-217; 2012). Using macaques -- animals whose neuroanatomy, genetics and behaviour are far closer to humans than are those of rodents -- the study showed that a drug called a PSD-95 inhibitor reduced the volume of brain tissue killed by the stroke and significantly preserved neurological function. It has now moved into human trials, where early results are promising.
via @DrEades
So your title would be a good start.
All you PETA morons:
Stop IMMEDIATELY taking any medication that was
tested using animals. If you get sicker and die, better you than our 'animal brethren' right?
Stop IMMEDIATELY eating any animal products: meat, fish, milk, eggs, all of it. You should probably not eat veggies either because then you could be depriving an animal of a meal.
Let's take care of the humans first. When there are no oppressed or starving humans anywhere on the planet, then we can start helping the animals.
Of course that's not as fashionable.
DrCos at March 22, 2012 4:00 AM
Stop IMMEDIATELY taking any medication that was
tested using animals.
Which would be, to a close approximation, all of them. I suppose aspirin is still allowed.
Ltw at March 22, 2012 5:09 AM
Also, transplants, blood transfusions, and pretty much any major surgery.
Ear/nipple/clit piercings are ok though. I'm pretty certain they weren't animal tested.
Ltw at March 22, 2012 5:12 AM
I've always wondered why Pamela Anderson is a spokesperson for PETA. From her bleached hair to her fake breasts, she just screams products tested on animals. I'm pretty sure her Hep C was treated with medicine that was tested on rats...
Kendra at March 22, 2012 6:33 AM
The claim may PETA members will make is that animal testing is absolutely not necessary, and that other methods are now just as effective, and cheaper, besides!
Perhaps what they should do is start up a research company that uses these cheaper and equally effective methods. If they're right, they should be able to out-compete the drug companies that insist on using wasteful techniques like animal testing.
Karl at March 22, 2012 8:23 AM
"I suppose aspirin is still allowed"
Nope, acetlysalicylic acid was tested on animals by Bayer way back in 1899.
I suggest rounding up all PETA members & sending them to Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. There's lots of room up there (it's the biggest uninhabited island on earth), and there are a thousand hungry polar bears waiting for them to practice their ethical treatment of animals.
Martin at March 22, 2012 9:21 AM
Gack! Acetylsalicylic...
Martin at March 22, 2012 9:24 AM
Yeah, but…
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at March 22, 2012 10:51 AM
Virtually every drug we use, either OTC or prescription, has been tested on animals. In order to procure FDA approval, a company must test the drug on animals and report all results, side effects, etc. No animal tests, no FDA approval.
So every Tylenol, Amoxocillin, birth control pill, Zoloft, Xanax, blah blah blah, that we have swallowed was tested at some point on an animal.
I've seen 5 year old children walk out of our hospital cured of acute lymphocytic leukemia, thanks to drug therapies that were tested on animals. So the research scientists had to kill some monkeys to save that child. Boo fucking hoo.
I love dogs and cats. I had horses and rabbits as pets growing up. But if I have to chose between the kitty or a human, human always wins.
UW Girl at March 22, 2012 1:25 PM
How dare you! How dare you!
UW Girl is a fucking speciesist... And she's not even ashamed!…
…Yet.
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at March 22, 2012 2:07 PM
Did you notice that on the other thread, PETA defenders could not name an animal adoption agency they associate with or support?
If PETA helped abandoned animals by placing them with adoption agencies, they'd have to admit domestic cats and dogs are better off being cared for by people.
But let's take the high road, and simply say that we will not waste an animal's life, that we favor proper wildlife management and domestic animal care, and that we favor the idea that people should learn everything they can about the critters they affect.
There you go!
Radwaste at March 22, 2012 3:30 PM
Damn straight! PETA morons need to wake up and realize if those cows and bunnies had opposable thumbs and a gun, they'd eat us.
UW Girl at March 22, 2012 4:33 PM
> if those cows and bunnies had opposable thumbs
> and a gun, they'd eat us.
Zactly. There was a comedian, maybe Carlin, who asked: "Ever notice how PETA prefers to throw red ink on the furs coats of Beverly Hills matrons rather than the leather jackets of Hell's Angels bikers"?
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at March 22, 2012 6:01 PM
One little step back for the West in science.
Love those little hurdles from politics. Can not not do stem cell and cloning here, somebody thing of the fetuses. To fear - it has the world NUCLEAR or ATOMIC in it so no I do not want to glow in the dark. To cute little animals - the above story. To law, lawsuits and lawfare .... we would love to release this wonder drug for heart disease but it will be cheaper in the end to just concentrate on this non needed but long lasting boner spray.
I am slowly seeing the US and the West getting slowly ignorant and backward. It will loose its place and standing in science and research to other countries. Where are the future research labs - China, India, Korea...
John Paulson at March 23, 2012 5:39 AM
interesting dilemma. There have been usable medical data derived from the studies carried out by the Nazis when they induced hypothermia on concentration camp prisoners. For example, the data has been used to calculate how long a search and rescue is needed if someone is thought to be freezing in the open water. Currently some people who are in paid clinical trials can suffer long term effects from taking, for instance, psychiatric drugs. Early studies of penicillin in Guatemala were done where orphaned children, prisoners and prostitutes who were sometimes purposefully infected with STDs. If I'm treated for hypothermia or treated with penicillin does it mean that I agree with or condone with unethical human experimentation? Should everyone who has serious ethical concerns about clinical trials for instance stop taking the drugs that they test?
Also, amazing that thousands of treatments for rats with stroke or rats with quadriplegia have been developed but none yet work on humans. I have mixed feelings about animal research however 90% of the animal models I hear about don't seem to validly be testing anything that could be relevant to humans (e.g. juvenile hamsters given prozac are more prone to aggress against others thus this is an explanation for prozac sometimes causing suicide in adolescents, stroke is induced in nonhuman animals in ways that are fundamentally different than how stroke happens in humans).
Diana at March 23, 2012 8:14 AM
I have suspected for a long time that PETA is secretly funded by India. Maybe we can go after them for not registering as foreign agents.
Or just deport them. They'd be happier there anyway.
John David Galt at March 24, 2012 10:38 AM
"I've always wondered why Pamela Anderson is a spokesperson for PETA."
This is simple. People who do not know how the world works often back ideas presented to them in the right terms. Who can be against better treatment for animals?
The phenomenon is exactly the same in Bible™ literalists. They do not know anything about the real world, but have emotional investment in believing the book, and so they declare the real world to be wrong.
Some feel the need to do something significant.
-----
"Also, amazing that thousands of treatments for rats with stroke or rats with quadriplegia have been developed but none yet work on humans."
Thousands? Citation, please.
Radwaste at March 24, 2012 6:38 PM
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