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Medical research involving animal experiments is detrimental to human health.
Graphic pictures of cats with electrodes clamped to their heads, or monkeys strapped to chairs with their brains cut open, their eyes filled with pain and terror, are enough to upset momentarily even the most hardened person. But most of us put these images out of our mind and accept the situation, because we’re told by the government and medical establishment that such experiments are for our own good.
They insist that without these procedures there will never be cures for the world’s diseases, and that those who oppose animal experiments are extremists holding back ‘progress’.
Yet, despite the supposed stringency of animal tests on drugs deemed safe for human consumption and released onto the market, two million Americans become seriously ill and approximately 100,000 people die every year because of reactions to medicines they were prescribed.
This figure exceeds the number of deaths from all illegal drugs combined. In England, an estimated 70,000 deaths and cases of severe disability occur each year because of adverse reactions to prescription drugs, making this the third most common cause of death.
The Femfatalites.com website reports that in women’s health experiments animals suffer and die in horrific ways. They are mutilated, poisoned, and starved. They have their bones broken, their arteries sewn shut, and their heads chopped off.
They are locked alone in filthy cages, sometimes for years. There are countless examples of animal experiments conducted in the name of women’s health issues: Pregnant rabbits are forced on treadmills to study exercise in pregnancy; rats are starved to study anorexia or have chilli peppers applied to their cervixes to study cervical pain.
As well as animal tests allowing unsafe drugs onto the market, the flip side is that human health is also compromised when drugs which may be beneficial to humans are prevented from being released. We only have to look in our own medicine cabinets for examples.
Today, around 58 billion aspirin per year are sold in worldwide, yet aspirin causes birth defects in mice and rats and results in such extensive blood abnormalities in cats that they can only take 20 per cent of the human dosage every third day. Another painkiller, ibuprofen, causes kidney failure in dogs, even at low doses. Some HIV drugs, used successfully today, were kept off the market for years because of adverse reactions in chimps.
So, the next time you’re asked to contribute money for ‘cancer research’ or ‘heart disease’, find out if the charity utilises animal testing – and if so, boycott it and donate to one which recognises that real medical progress can only be made through studying our own species.
A list of these is available on the website of the Australian Association for Humane Research (AAHR), a non-profit organisation that challenges the use of animals in research on both ethical and scientific grounds and promotes the use of more humane and scientifically-valid non-animal methods of research such as genomics, nanotechnology, epidemiology and computer modelling.
www.aahr.asn.au
www.curedisease.com
www.femfatalities.com
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