David Cameron has thrown a rare opportunity away in order to make a cheap tabloid hit.
It happened last time in 1994. It will not happen again until 2037. We hold the Presidency for six months in the Council of Europe. It started in May and will be over in November. It was a great opportunity to spread some of the UK's best practises to the 46 member states with poor human rights records. We blew that. We concentrated on the issue of votes for prisoners - a matter of monumental insignificance compared with the summary arrests, torture and abuse that is traditional in many European prisons. Other countries have seen us talk about our national customs. They have national customs too. Cruel ones.
On Wednesday the Prime Minister will address the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. He will be seeking flattering headlines about the interference in UK laws by Europe - especially in the failure to expel Abu Qatada. There is universal outrage at this decision. He will be wildly acclaimed and his popularity will rise.
Good short term politics for him. Atrocious waste for those suffering in the hell holes of Europe's worst prisons.
Human cost of animal testing
Over fifty years ago the medicine thalidomide was withdrawn. Thousands of women who had taken the drug as a ‘safe’ treatment for morning sickness gave birth to babies with severe abnormalities.
Yesterday it was reported that a drug prescribed on a large scale for three decades to prevent miscarriage may be the cause of a rare form of cancer in some of the daughters and granddaughters of the women who took it.
This latest example of the potential of medicinal drugs to produce devastating adverse reactions highlights the need for a rigorous examination of our reliance on animal experiments to predict the safety of medicines for humans.
In 2010 over 3.7 million procedures involving over 3.6 million animals were instigated. Compared with 2009 the total rose by just over 3%. This was the eighth increase in the last ten years.
The upward trend has occurred alongside increasing opposition from scientists and clinicians to the use of animals as a means of accurately predicting reactions in patients, and a growing body of evidence in favour of human biology-based experimentation.
Advancements in science have proved empirically that animal testing can be scientifically unreliable, not least because the bodies of different species behave in such diverse ways. While it is true that different individuals may not respond to a drug in the same manner, we are considerably more different from animals than we are from each other. Why then should we be surprised when animal data applied to humans produces inconsistent and unexpected results?
Extensive animal testing failed to predict the devastating consequences of thalidomide. Though the scandal did result in a number of reforms in drug safety testing, fifty years on animal-based methods are still heavily relied upon to establish the safety of prescription drugs for human use.
Last year the Safer Medicines Trust, with the support of 21 senior scientists, sent an open letter to the Prime Minister and Health Secretary calling for the effectiveness of animal experiments in predicting the safety of medicines to be compared with a set of human biology-based tests. The letter was published in the leading medical journal, The Lancet, and 156 Members of Parliament signed the following EDM:
That this House believes that the safety of medicines should be established by the most reliable methods available in order to reduce the large and increasing toll of serious adverse drug reactions; and calls on the Government to initiate a comparison of currently required animal tests with a set of human biology-based tests, as proposed in the Safety of Medicines (Evaluation) Bill 2009, to see which is the most effective means to predict the safety of medicines for patients.
Following yesterday’s disturbing revelations about the “silent thalidomide”, Diethylstilboestrol, should we not question how many other routinely prescribed drugs proven safe by animal experimentation are in fact surreptitiously causing harm not only to our own bodies but to those of future generations?
Our attention must be diverted from scientifically unreliable data derived from animal tests to the adoption of more advanced methods based on human biology if we are to improve our understanding of the safety of medicines and prevent fatal adverse effects for patients in the future.
Sorry Paul, but to concentrate on animal testing instead of what is the bigger picture problem is a true waste here.
Nobody thinks that animal testing guarantees, or even does anything more than to suggest that a product may be safe to test in humans.
There can be improvements in animal testing and the conditions of the animals but compared to the broader issue of ensuring that studies are done to the highest standards and reported accurately and that the evidence of efficacy should inform prescribing, animal testing is a sideshow.
I know its popular, but ask the people who know about this stuff and they will tell you what the most important issues are when it comes to potential harm to people from treatments.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK66204/
We need an utterly clear process on clinical trials - we need an accessible database where the trial details aims and results are freely available for anyone to view and the pharmaceutical industry has to be forced to follow best practice if they wish to market any new drugs.
That is the biggest and best thing you could be pushing for to improve the situation for patients, please don't get misdirected into making a big song and dance about animal testing.
Again, yes animal testing can be improved, yes some will be unnecessary and we can tighten the guidelines and oversight.
But even in animal testing, that is valid and potentially useful, problems with the actual operation of the testing can make the results worthless.
Please focus on what can bring the biggest improvements for everyone as well as helping industry move up several grades in best practice rather than the popular emotional issue of far less import or effect.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/05/bad-science-drug-trial-secrecy
Posted by: HuwOS | January 23, 2012 at 08:44 PM