People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is screaming bloody murder over some HIV-related experiments that Ohio State University Michael Podell plans on carrying out in cats. The routine never changes: Podell gets a grant from the National Institute of Health, and PETA butts in saying in its estimable medical opinion the experiment is junk and should be stopped.
So what’s the deal? With effective HIV treatments, many people who contract the disease live a very long time. Unfortunately some of them continue inappropriate behaviors such as drug use. Podell wants to answer this question: we know methamphetamine use increase the rate of neurological degeneration. What special problems does methamphetamine drug abuse pose for long-term HIV sufferers?
Cats have two things that make them good models to explore such a question. First, they can contract feline immunodeficiency virus, which is similar in many respects to HIV. Second, they react in similar ways to methamphetamines. As Podell told the Associated Press, “We want to understand more about HIV and drug abuse in people. One of the ways to do that is to develop an animal model that has similar characteristics.”
The Associated Press reported that PETA has a couple of argument as to why this is a bad idea, but in reality all PETA has is a couple of non-sequitirs — not anything reasonable enough to qualify as an argument, especially since this is the same recycled nonsense PETA uses to argue against all animal experimentation.
First, PETA claims that FIV and HIV aren’t similar enough for research on one to be applicable to another. This is simply a bland assertion that they make about everything but never bother to back up. Polio in non-human primates is different from polio in human beings yet it is similar enough to have yielded important understanding and eventually a vaccine. “Animals are different than people” is not an argument but a claim that demands proof — proof that PETA and animal rights activists simply can’t provide.
Second, in a similar vein PETA’s Peter Wood claims that, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know meth use will have an adverse effect on your body so the disease will be prompted more vigorously. Our limited resources would be better spent on teaching people how to avoid contracting HIV or on drug prevention.”
Lets parse that. The “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist” introduction is, of course, a non sequitur and an ad hominem to boot. More importantly, the sentence obscures the point of the research. Nobody suggests that methamphetamine abuse is good for HIV positive individuals. The problem, however, is that saying “meth use is bad for HIV positive people” is hardly an effective diagnostic and treatment tool for dealing with HIV positive individuals who have been abusing methamphetamine for too long. It might not take a rocket scientist to know meth abuse is going to harm the body, but even a non-doctor should be able to tell that simply informing patients that they shouldn’t have used methamphetamine because it was bad for them isn’t going to cut it either. The more precise information we have about how the disease interacts with common human behaviors, the better off we are — and given the high prevalence of HIV among drug abusers, to ignore that subpopulation is to bury our heads in the sand.
Finally, the claim that this sort of experiment detracts from HIV or drug prevention makes little sense given the huge budgets devoted to both efforts. The interesting part of that sentence is that Wood doesn’t suggest that the money go toward finding a cure since any research toward finding a cure or ameliorating HIV inevitably involves animal research.
Driven by media images, much of the public seems to think that scientists sit in a lab, do a few experiments and find a new cure. In fact finding a vaccine or cure for something like HIV requires years, often decades, of basic research consisting of just the sort of experiments that Podell proposes to do. It’s not glamorous, it’s not the sort of thing people even like to think about given the role domesticated cats play in many of our lives, but it is exactly the sort of experiment needed to add to our cumulative knowledge about HIV on the way to more effective treatments.
Source:
AIDS study targeting cats infuriates animal activists. The Associated Press, October 9, 2000.