The Importance Of Animal Testing

When picking out your personal care or cleaning products do you even stop to see what kind you are using? You could be supporting animal cruelty and not even know it. Today many household products are being tested on animals. Helpless and defenseless animals are being performed on for different types of experiments all around the world. Most of the things being performed in these labs you could never imagine one human being doing to another. I believe that animal testing should be illegal because it is inhumane, not very reliable, and is proved to be unnecessary.
Testing on animals is inhumane. One hundred million animals are killed for research each year in the United States alone. Animals such as mice, birds, rats, fish, frogs, dogs, monkeys,
In March, 2006, human volunteers were injected with a substance called TGN 1412, the experiment was created by TeGenero Immuno Therapeutics. As described by one of the scientist: “Within minutes, the human test subjects were writhing on the floor in agony. The compound was designed to dampen the immune response, but it had supercharged theirs, unleashing a cascade of chemicals that sent all six to the hospital. Several of the men suffered permanent organ damage, and one man’s head swelled up so horribly that British tabloids refer to the case as the ‘elephant man trial.” The same drug was first tested on animals and showed no side effects. This shows how animal testing is not just dangerous but very unreliable. Researcher Hans Ruesch adds that “approximately 15,000 new drugs are marketed every year, while some 12,000 are withdrawn. Animal testing may not be as accurate as it appears when it comes to the health of the American people.” According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “1.5 million Americans were hospitalized in a single year due to pharmaceutical drugs given to "cure" them. 30 percent of those hospitalized suffered further harm from the therapy they were
Testing alternatives include: ‘in vitro test methods and models based on human cell and tissue cultures, computerized patient-drug databases and virtual drug trials, computer models and simulations, stem cell and genetic testing methods, non-invasive imaging techniques such as MRIs and CT Scans, and micro dosing.’ Synthetic skin has been designed and can provide a chemical determination in as little as 3 minutes to four hours, unlike animal testing that often takes two to four weeks. InVitro, another alternative test used to “measure the effectiveness of sunscreens and was reported to do in days what it takes animal studies months to do, and estimates that it can test five or six products for less than half the cost to study a single product in animals. The traditional testing of chemicals using animals can take up to five years per substance and cost millions of dollars, while non-animal alternatives can test hundreds of chemicals in a week for a fraction of the