Questioning the benefits and drawbacks of animal testing

Animal Testing Debate

ANIMAL TESTING

Animal testing as well as experimenting, is a practice that has been there from the fifteenth century, even though the activity become more popular in the 1800's. Ever since individuals that realized animals could feel pain, a debate on animal testing became an issue as well as a controversial topic.

Every year scientists experiment with around 100 million monkeys, rats, dogs mice, and fish in the name of medical discoveries. The animals are exposed to medicines and therapies, which could be the next drug for cancer treatment. The majority of animals involved in the study are rats as well as mice. Animal testing is significant in the medical world as animal experimentation plays a vital role in numerous medical advances (Gahlmann, 1993). These include development of vaccines, surgical techniques and antibiotics.

Great discoveries have been by using animal testing in transplants of kidneys, disease treatment such as diabetes and tuberculosis. An oral drug used as experiment has been instrumental in lowering the levels of blood sugar and irritation in mice associated with Type 2 diabetes. This suggests that the medication can in the future be used by millions of people suffering from a similar ailment according to the latest research.

A study showing the reason other people are more resistant than others are to sicknesses like tuberculosis (TB) as well as leprosy has acknowledged a fresh genetic variant which, influence disease susceptibility of these diseases (Hayhurst, 2000). The findings by use of zebra fish can have repercussions for potential treatments for the two ailments. Techniques, which were developed at UW -- Madison, founded on animal studies, have seen the first transplant of the bone marrow. Such transplants have been beneficial in treatment of leukemia, immune deficiency, plastic anemia and Hodgkin's disease.