Animal Testing Benefits

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One might be inclined to think that animal testing is nothing but mindlessly injecting puppies with deadly diseases and killing mice, however, that claim is incorrect. Here is a short brief on animal testing containing facts and any important information pertaining to the benefits of testing on animals. Seventeen to twenty-three million animals are used for animal testing per year, 95% are specially bred rats, 4.25% are rabbits, guinea pigs, sheep, fish, frogs, pigs, birds, insects, and other species, and 0.75% are dogs, cats, and primates. (California Biomedical Research Association). Throughout the last, nearly every scientific breakthrough in human health has been the result of animal testing; there is no doubt that scientists must use animals …show more content…
Testing on animals is necessary to further biomedical research and ensure the safety of new medicines. If animal testing was not a common practice, the amount of humans who die from faulty or ineffective medicine would greatly increase. Animals make good research subjects because most, if not all, animals are biologically similar to humans in one way or another. It is common knowledge that chimpanzees share more than 99% of their DNA with humans. In addition, mice (which account for 95% of all animals tested on) share more than 98% DNA with humans. Therefore, animals are subjected to many of the same health problems as humans. Biomedical research on animals doesn not just benefit humans, animal testing has improved the lives of countless animals. More than 80 medicines and vaccines developed for humans are now used to treat animals. (California Biomedical Research Association.) Testing on animals has helped to develop vaccines to fight diseases including rabies in dogs and cats, feline leukemia, infectious hepatitis virus, tetanus, and has greatly helped in the development of treatments for heartworm. (Simon Festing and Robin …show more content…
Computers are limited by their processing power. A recent simulation of just half a mouse’s brain required use of the world’s fastest supercomputer and took thirty hours to simulate a few beats of the heart. As recently as 2015, a three-dimensional map of 1,500 cubic microns of a rat’s brain took around six years to develop. With the time that it takes to emulate such a small fraction of a rat’s brain, computer simulations will not be happening in the near future. (Alison Abbott). Micro-dosing is a new and very popular “alternative” to animal testing. Rather than testing on animals, scientists give people very small doses of a potential new drug. However, because the dose is so small, scientists cannot measure side-effects of the drugs they are testing. The Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments (FRAME), a UK-based organization that advocates for the replacement of animal testing, even commented on the subject of Micro-Dosing and stated that “animal studies will still be required”. Whenever possible, researchers do use non-animal models for research. Computer models, tissue and cell cultures, and a number of other non-animal related research methods are used today in biomedical research. Computer models are used to screen and determine the toxic level of a substance in the beginning of an experiment and tissue and cell cultures have become valuable
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