Tag: Medical Research

Could animal rights activist be wrong about gene therapy?

For the past few months animal
rights groups and activists have been repeating the same old line about
new advances in Genetic Engineering — it’ll never work, it’s cruel because
some of it uses animals, and it is being pushed just so greedy companies
can bilk people out of their money.

So imagine my surprise when
it was announced this week that the first genetic therapy to correct a
human health problem has been tested and appears to work rather well.
The experiment involved injecting a gene for a protein that helps the
heart build new blood vessels to relieve chest pains from angina. The
16 patients who received the injections of vascular endothelia growth
factor suffer from clogged arteries but were considered to week to undergo
bypass surgery or angioplasty.

Sixteen patients of Dr. Jeffrey
Isner of St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston who suffered from extreme
chest pains with even minor exertions all saw substantial improvements
in their angina. Of 11 patients who were followed up after three months,
six were entirely free of pain.

One of the patients, farmer
Floyd Stokes from DeLeon Texas, described his experience on the new treatment,
“One Sunday morning I woke up and told my wife I hadn’t felt so good
in 15 years. I felt fantastic.”

More studies are required to measure
the long term improvement to decide whether this treatment is more efficacious
than currently available treatments, but so far the results are promising.
Thank goodness these researchers weren’t listening when animal rights
activists said genetic engineering would never work.

Vegetarian Times hack piece against animal testing

The October 1998 issue of Vegetarian Times contained a mostly hack piece against animal testing by freelance
writer Kelly James-Enger. James-Enger’s article does quote Adrian Morrison
as saying, “a careful reading of the historical record [of animal
research] reveals that it’s been absolutely indispensable for discovering
and understanding basic biological processes.”

Unfortunately, James-Enger
never bothers to even try to reconcile or explain this in the context
of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine activist Steven Ragland
who in the very next sentence is quoted as saying, “Humans and animals
differ too much to make animal research useful.”

Using insulin derived from
Pigs to treat Diabetes must then qualify as yet another ineffective and
useless innovation foisted upon the world by the evil drug companies.
But if Ragland and the PCRM say humans and non-humans are too different
to make animal research useful, God forbid if anyone at Vegetarian
Times should critically examine the claim.

Tumor-destroying virus tested in mice

A reovirus that normally causes mild respiratory
infections in human beings has been found to be an effective killer of
cancerous tumors in mice.

According to a report in Science,
the reovirus uses the Ras pathway in the cells of mice, which normally
regulates cell growth. It is the Ras pathway that is activated in about
75 percent of human cancers.

Other viruses have been found to destroy tumors,
but this is the first virus that uses the Ras pathway. “This is the
pathway everyone wants to target,” said Peter Forsyth, an oncologist
at the University of Calgary. “The treatment is very effective.”

The main advantage of the reovirus is that
it doesn’t seem to affect noncancerous cells. Clinical trials in human
beings are years away, however.

Damned if you do . . .

One of vice-president Al Gore’s big environmental
projects has been to force chemical companies to test thousands of chemicals
already on the market for toxicity – most of these chemicals were
in widespread use before modern safety regulations and thus never went
through the testing regimen that new compounds go through. The Environmental
Protection Agency pressured the Chemical Manufacturers Association into
running a battery of five animal toxicity tests on 3,000 or so chemicals.

The use of animal toxicity tests brought an
objection from the Humane Society of the United States, which wants the
EPA to use this initiative to develop and implement alternatives to animal
testing, saying among other things that “the relevance of all this
animal testing to human safety is questionable, according to several toxicologists
with whom we have conferred.”

According to HSUS, the LD50 test (which establishes
the dose level that kills 50 percent of the experimental animals) is “widely
criticized on humane and scientific grounds.”

In fact, if interpreted properly, the LD50
tests still give important information about toxicity that can’t be gleaned
solely from the tissue and cell culture alternatives that HSUS and other
animal rights organizations push.

Those tests certainly have their place,
especially for establishing potential toxicity before conducting animal
tests, but there is still an enormous gap between testing on isolated
tissues and cells and testing on a whole organism.

Cornell activists burn effigy of Animal Welfare Committee chairman

Nine animal rights activists at
Cornell University were recently arrested for trespassing during a demonstration
outside a biology laboratory. A press release by two of the activists
said one of the arrested students is being charged with harassment, “a
charge which violated a restraining order placed on him by the campus
Judicial Administrator after an effigy-torching of the Animal Welfare
Committee chairman last week.”

This is what animal rights activists
must mean when they talk about having compassion for all living creatures.
What is more reprehensible is that, according to the justifications offered
by some activists in favor of “direct action,” this isn’t
really violence because, as in raids on laboratories and fur farms,
all that is being destroyed is property.

Sure, and when the KKK burns a
cross on some black family’s lawn or paints swastikas on a synagogue,
all they’re really doing is harming property in a peaceful, non-violent
way.

Sources:

Activists attempt to view animal mutilation. Cornell Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Press Release, November 2, 1998.

Will transplant recipients be less than human?

Animal rights activists seem to
be increasingly desperate in their fight against Xenotransplantation –
the transplanting of organs and tissues from animals into human beings.
First, they argued such transplantation simply wouldn’t work. After
that argument failed, they argued there were enormous dangers of passing
diseases between animals and humans. Now that the evidence indicates this
risk is minimal, the activists are pulling out the big guns in their rhetorical
grab bag – people who receive animal organs aren’t really human.

According to Gill Langley, who
co-wrote a recent report on xenotransplantation for the
British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection and Compassion in World Farming, “The
human xenotransplantation patient will become a literal chimera. It sounds
like scare-mongering, but let me assure you that the word chimera is being
used by xenotransplant scientists.”

Scare-mongering? From an animal rights
activist?

If the thought of being less than
human isn’t enough, Langley’s report warns that patients whose
lives are saved by these new technologies (which he still claims won’t
work) could face unknown psychological consequences.

So this is the justification
that animal rights activists are going to present to the 50,000 people
in Europe alone who are waiting to receive organs? Xenotransplantation
must be stopped to prevent those dying individuals from becoming less
than human and suffering the attendant psychological side effects. Better
dead than depressed?

Source:

Activists say animal transplants make us less human. Reuters, October 13, 1998.