Animal Use in Disease Research
Do you think animals
feel pain like humans? If humans feel pain, they will cry or scream to show
that they are in that feeling. Animals also give those reactions when someone
or something hurts them. It means they feel agony like humans feel it. Because
of this conclusion, many people believe that using animals in disease research
is cruel and morally wrong. Therefore, they want it to be banned. However, the
discoveries of medicine that use animals on their research have helped a lot of
people. In fact, it will still help them in the next hundreds years. Some
people might want to replace animals in disease research with something else,
but the following reasons will show why using animals in it should not be
forbidden.
First, many people
believe that it is wrong to involve humans in disease research because it means
deliberately exposing them to health risk. Some polls show that most of people
agree to use animals than humans in research that must involve living organism.
They are polls by Yougov(2006) in London, UK and by Gallup Organization in May
2004 in U.S. The former disclose that 89% people there accept the use of animals
in that kind of research. The later also show nearly similar result, which is
62% American think that it is morally acceptable.
Then, as stated before,
there are researches that must involve living organism, and we have concluded
that humans cannot be used as an object for those researches. For solution,
animals provide almost similar model of humans. The similarities are in anatomy
and physiology. So, if scientists want to know how human body will react to a
substance, they can see it by giving the substance to animals. Human reaction
will be similar with that. For example, chemotherapy drugs to cure cancer were
developed by using chickens, rodents and dogs. The reactions that were given by
those animals are similar to reactions from human who is using it now. They are
hair loss, queasy stomach, vomit and death of cancer cell.
Also, replacing animals
with new technologies or another option will slow science development. It is
true that there are several device that scientist can use in research. However
those are new inventions. They are computer model, tissue culture, and
imitation of single organ. Since they are new, it takes time to study them all,
makes guidelines for next scientists and establishes new regulation about using
those devices. On the other hand, animals use is already common in science.
Thus, scientists do not have to waste their time to study guideline carefully.
They who oppose this
idea also have some reasons. One is that scientists often do not care with
animals feeling. Scientists often do vivisection- slice while alive- and do not
use anesthesia to reduce animal pain. For example, when scientist studied basic
mechanisms of heart disease, they did surgery to dogs. Then, they tested heart
transplant technique to them, but they did not anaesthetize them. They said
using anesthesia would make the result incorrect.
Another is too many
animals which are used and then die for just a research that might fail.
Scientists need to test their conclusion again and again to ensure the safety
of their invention. To do it, they use more than one animal. In US, 17 million
to 100 million rats are used in vivisection a year.
Briefly, there are
several reasons why animals use in disease research can be accepted. However,
those are just for which need to involve living organism. Using animals should
be viewed as a way to rescue human life. Then, for this case, scientists need
to do refinement and reduction.
