WHY I WANT HLS TO CLOSE - by Dr.Jerry Vlasek

Huntington Life Sciences is Europe's largest contract animal-testing facility, and as such kills an average of 500 animals each day to test agrochemicals, cosmetics, potential drugs and other products for humans. They are paid handsomely to perform these procedures, which they do behind tightly closed doors and razor wire. It seems the public is only too aware of what is going on in these laboratories, having the benefit of information gathered during five separate undercover investigations of the facilities. This same public is aware not only of the cruelty to animals involved, but of the complete lack of scientific validity of these tests, and the huge waste of scarce health-care resources they entail.

As a physician actively involved with patient care, and indeed as a former animal researcher myself, I can say without equivocation that testing on animals is completely and wholly unnecessary. More than 85% of all data gleaned from animal research is discarded; never even published or disseminated, much less used to help human patients. The remaining 15% never proves useful in human medicine either, demonstrating the gigantic inefficiency of animal-based research. As a paradigm, animal experimentation is a failure. If my surgical results were as dismal as these, I would certainly lose my license to practice medicine; I'd probably be put in jail!

I always like to tell people who think we are winning the "disease war" through vivisection that, since the 1974 when then-US president Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, cancer rates have gone UP, strokes are UP, heart disease UP, diabetes UP, addiction UP, alcoholism UP. There is more suffering, more disease, and more deaths from these causes today than ever before. Non-human animals, like people, can be infected with viruses and bacteria, can develop cancer, and can be made sick in many other ways. But just because a concept works in an animal does not mean that it will work in a human.

®Rabies produces many of the same symptoms in humans and animals but a vaccine that works in animals may kill a human.
®Polio can be produced in monkeys but since the disease is subtly different experimental results cannot be extrapolated to humans.
®Herpes B exists in animals and can be transmitted from an animal to a human, but Herpes B is asymptomatic in monkeys and kills humans.

The great advances in science that have given us the high standard of medical care humans and animals enjoy today have come from clinical observation, in vitro research, epidemiology, autopsies, serendipity, computer and mathematical modeling, technology, tissue research using the tissue from the species being studied, molecular biology and genetics, post-marketing drug surveillance, the basic sciences of maths, chemistry and physics and the specialization of medical care including the specialization of physicians and veterinarians. The animal experimentation lobby, however, spends millions annually to convince the public that all medical advances are directly due to animal experimentation. Examples of this fallacy include:
®Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is deadly to cats;
®aspirin causes birth defects in some animals and blood abnormalities in cats;
®ibuprofen (Motrin) causes kidney disease in dogs at very low doses.
®Asbestos, arsenic and benzene are a few of the products that lingered on the marketplace because they were proven safe on animals but are deadly to humans.
®Tobacco use was promoted by doctors and many others because it failed to produce ill effects in dogs forced to smoke thousands of cigarettes.
®Penicillin and cyclosporine, a drug used for transplant patients, were held back from human use for decades because they did not work on animals. Penicillin and streptomycin are historical examples of in vitro discovery, and there have been thousands since.
Not only are in vitro (test tube) tests more humane than killing animals by exposing them to poisons, but also they have been shown to be more accurate in producing results which correlate from laboratory to real life. Toxicity tests using human cell cultures are two to three times more accurate than tests on rats and mice.

Furthermore, animals are not able to communicate about any side effects they may be experiencing. At least half of the side effects experienced by most drugs cannot be accurately communicated by animals.
In April 1998, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported on a study which showed that more than 2 million Americans become seriously ill every year because of toxic reactions to correctly prescribed medicine and 106,000 die from those reactions, making drug side effects the sixth most common cause of death in this country! Legal drugs kill more people per year than all illegal drugs combined.
As a surgeon, people expect me and want me to argue against vivisection on a purely scientific basis. I can do that. However, I cannot and will not forgo the ethical argument. For when all is said and done, I believe that research on animals is ethically wrong, and that nothing "good" can ever come out of something so morally debased.

I often cite the hypothermia experiments done on Jews in the concentration camps during World War II. This experimentation on helpless, non- consenting humans who suffered and died as a result of these experiments actually taught scientists a great deal about treating hypothermia in humans. But was it right? I would argue that is was absolutely wrong, no matter how much useful information we garnered.
Blacks in America were similarly exploited in the late 1800s, and indeed even as late as the last decade. Women were operated on unnecessarily to test new operations, without their consent, and men with syphilis were refused treatment in order to study the natural course of the disease. This "experiment" only ended in the 1980's after being publicly exposed.

Now animals continue to be used, without their consent and against their will, in gruesome and painful experiments. Healthy non-human animals are being murdered by the millions every year.
"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race. The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further." Mark Twain