Urge the FDA to STOP Requiring Animal Experimentation on New Drugs!
- by: Kat Head
- recipient: United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
"Right now, millions of mice, rats, rabbits, primates, cats, dogs, and other animals are locked inside cold, barren cages in laboratories across the country. They languish in pain, ache with loneliness, and long to roam free and use their minds. Instead, all they can do is sit and wait in fear of the next terrifying and painful procedure that will be performed on them." -PETA
Does that sound like a life we want animals everywhere to be living? Of course not! But unfortunately, the FDA requires most new drug to be tested on animals before it can be tested on humans. Therefore, there can be no cures unless animal testing is utilized. But this is only because of a policy, not because of actual fact! We can CHANGE this and help the animals!
According to Animal Liberation Front, the FDA requires these tests:
a) "Animal models allow pharmaceutical companies to hasten drugs through approval, thus minimizing the expensive development process that is also fraught with unforeseeable challenges. That lab animals can be contained, controlled and monitored renders them ideal little drug factories, and though the drugs produced may work in the animals, it does not necessarily follow that they will benefit a completely different species. It just "appears" that it will."
b) Animal models furnish pharmaceutical companies with liability protection. If a drug harms a human, company representatives can testify that it tested safe on animals.
c) The FDA is effectively financed and staffed by the pharmaceutical industry. The agency "works for" the industry, not for consumers, because consumers are not making campaign contributions; nor are they arbiters of job security.
That means that the reason for animal testing is to help rich people become even RICHER! Animals are being tortured and killed, not for cures, but for MONEY! And we are letting this continue!
Not only that, but because of the quick drug-approval process, the drugs tested on animals may well harm humans! The FDA needs to change it's policies. We need change now! The animals can't wait!
Dear Sir/Madam,
We the undersigned are outraged that the United States Food and Drug Administration makes it a requirement to test out certain new drugs on animals before they can be tested on humans or made available to the public. We urge you to immediately replace any and all animals in research with humane, non-animal alternative methods.
We are sure that you know that the information garnered from animal models is not necessarily accurate or predictive. And the information certainly does not protect consumers. In fact, data from animal models often causes more harm than good. Sometimes, drugs are approved too quickly on positive results in animals. Then, patients take them and fall ill and may die as a result. We cannot allow this dangerous practice of animal tests to continue, at the expense of not only animals, but humans as well.
We are aware that the FDA itself has noted that 92 percent of all drugs shown to be safe and effective in animal tests fail in human trials because they are unsafe or ineffective. And of the 8 percent that are approved for human usage, half of them are relabeled because of dangerous side effects that were not identified in the animal model. This is not sound science, and we cannot be basing the research that will affect the future of our health and wellness off of such inaccuracy.
We also know that the main reasons that animal data is used in the drug approval process is so that pharmaceutical companies can hasten their drugs through approval, minimizing the costs, and so that pharmaceutical companies can have liability protection, so that if their drug harms a human they can safely say that it caused no such harm in the animal tests. These are not sound reasons to be causing harm to many thousands of animals, and to be using bad science as a basis for the research done on products the majority of Americans will use.
Alternatives to animal tests are effective, reliable, affordable and humane. Unlike crude, archaic animal tests, non-animal methods usually take less time to complete, cost only a fraction of what the animal experiments cost, and do not face the problems that are inevitable in animal tests due to the difference in species.
Human clinical and epidemiological studies, human tissue and cell-based research methods, cadavers, sophisticated high-fidelity human patient simulators and computational models are just a sampling of the other options for testing drugs that are out there. For example, progressive scientists have used human brain cells to develop a model 'micro- brain,' which can be used to study tumors, as well as artificial skin and bone marrow. We can now test irritancy on protein membranes, produce and test vaccines using human tissues, and perform pregnancy tests using blood samples instead of cruelly taking the lives of animals. Animal experiments are bad science, and they only persist because of personal biases and archaic traditions. If we can have more reliable, more precise, less expensive, and more humane ways of gathering data, then why don't we use them?
In order to protect the health and safety of American consumers, and to promote the humane treatment of animals in society, it is critical that non-animal alternative tests consistently be used instead of animal tests to research and approve drugs.
We the undersigned urge the FDA to immediately replace all animals in research with humane, non-animal alternative methods. There is no longer a reason to test on animals, and the tests are a danger to American consumers who use these drugs.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
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