Drug safety
Animal experiments and drug safety
Scientists say that banning animal experiments would mean either
- an end to testing new drugs or
- using human beings for all safety tests
Animal experiments are not used to show that drugs are safe and effective in human beings - they cannot do that. Instead, they are used to help decide whether a particular drug should be tested on people.
Animal experiments eliminate some potential drugs as either ineffective or too dangerous to use on human beings. If a drug passes the animal test it's then tested on a small human group before large scale clinical trials.
The pharmacologist William D H Carey demonstrated the importance of animal testing in a letter to the British Medical Journal:
We have 4 possible new drugs to cure HIV. Drug A killed all the rats, mice and dogs. Drug B killed all the dogs and rats. Drug C killed all the mice and rats. Drug D was taken by all the animals up to huge doses with no ill effect. Question: Which of those drugs should we give to some healthy young human volunteers as the first dose to humans (all other things being equal)?
To the undecided (and non-prejudiced) the answer is, of course, obvious. It would also be obvious to a normal 12 year old child...
An alternative, acceptable answer would be, none of those drugs because even drug D could cause damage to humans. That is true, which is why Drug D would be given as a single, very small dose to human volunteers under tightly controlled and regulated conditions.
William DH Carey, BMJ 2002; 324: 236a