People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has taken out billboards denouncing the March of Dimes for supporting medical research with animals. The Shreveport Times described the billboards thusly,
This, the second billboard PETA has put up in the Shreveport area in the last six months, depicts a pregnant monkey with wires cemented into her back. The caption reads, “march of Dimes Helping or Hurting.” Similar billboards will go up, or have gone up, in several other cities nationwide.
PETA spokeswoman Brandi Valladolid told the Shreveport Times that they placed billboards in the cities that the March of Dimes claims have the highest rates of birth defects. But, surprise, the March of Dimes tells the Shreveport Times that it does not produce a list of birth defect incidence by city.
Imagine that — a PETA activists with inaccurate information.
But Valladolid doesn’t stop there. She repeats the nonsensical claim made repeatedly by PCRM and PETA that the diet drugs fen-phen show the dangers of animal testing,
. . . because animal testing cleared them as safe for human consumption when in fact they are not.
How do you know a PETA activist is lying? He or she is still talking.
First, fen-phen was an off-label prescription that was never tested in animals. Of course for PETA and PCRM to understand this, they’d have to leave their fantasy worlds to actually develop an understanding of how drugs are tested and prescribed.
Second, animal testing conducted prior to approval of both fenfluramine and phentermine revealed side effects that could cause the sorts of problems that the combinatory treatment was eventually linked to. Fenfluramine, for example, was only approved for use by patients for at most a few weeks, but doctors prescribed it to patients for months and years. Similarly, the FDA noted in approving phentermine that there was no safety data at all for its usage beyond 1 year.
But when the drugs were pulled off the market, the average length of time patients had been on the off-label combination was 9 months. The animal and human testing of both drugs worked fine — physicians simply chose to ignore that data and the warnings and cautions from the FDA based on that data.
But PETA has never let the facts get in the way of a good lie, so why start now?
Source:
PETA takes on animal testing in new billboard campaign. Sarah Pancoast, The Shreveport Times, April 4, 2003.