Animals in Scientific Research
Medical Research - AIDS and other infectious diseases
HIV/AIDS is a difficult disease to understand, and especially challenging to explain in depth to those without a medical background.
Suffice it to say, no two species have identical immune systems and no species react exactly the same way to disease. Research with animals has misled scientists many times with HIV.
Below are just a few examples:
1. Vaccines that were effective in animals were not in humans.
2. In Report 3291 of the National Assembly of France:
Pierre Tambourin, then head of the life science department of CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, the largest research organization in Europe, Tambourin had power over 25OO researchers and 4000 engineers and technicians, all civil servants) testified before the board of MPs on July 9, 1996: "What are the chances of developing a prion disease following ingestion of contaminated meat? Nobody knows, but we must not repeat the error we did in 1983-1985 with AIDS, when we referred to animal models to dramatically underestimate the risk to which humans are exposed." As MEPs asked later for more precise wordings, he admitted that he alluded to negative chimps experiments which convinced experts that transfusion of contaminated blood is devoid of risk.
Thousand of French citizens died as a result of receiving HIV-tainted blood.
3. Chimpanzees lack some of the killer cells that humans have.
4. B-lymphocytes produce more antibodies in chimpanzees and they produce them earlier, thus stopping disease spread. Humans drop their antibody count prior to systemic illness. Chimpanzees do not.
5. Furthermore, HIV-virus particles are far more ubiquitous in humans than in chimps. Chimpanzees seem to confine HIV to blood cells, while in humans it is also in the plasma, saliva, and cerebral spinal fluid.
6. Chimpanzees exhibit only a flulike illness in response to being infected with the virus, whereas humans go on to full-blown AIDS. Humans also develop opportunistic infections and cancers associated with HIV, which chimpanzees do not. Nor do infected chimps manifest classic changes in the central-nervous system that infected humans do.
7. Animal experimentation suggested that HIV progressed slowly with long latency periods. In humans, however, it was found that HIV progressed rapidly with short latency periods.
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For further detail on HIV/AIDS read Sacred Cows and Golden Geese (Continuum 2000) and read the following in depth anaylsis. You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this file.
HIV/AIDS | |
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