Lifeline Campaign: Vivisection Q&A

WHAT IS VIVISECTION? • It literally means ‘cutting up’ – the practice of performing operations on live animals for the purpose of experimentation or scientific research.

• It is cruel, unreliable and unnecessary. Most studies are curiosity-driven and have no tangible benefit to humans.

• Vivisection leads to the unnecessary deaths of millions of animals per year and can involve drugging, burning, addicting, freezing, infecting, surgically mutilating and isolating animals, often with no pain relief or anaesthetics.

HOW MANY ANIMALS ARE USED? • In 2017 almost 4 million procedures were carried out on live animals in the UK. A procedure is an act that causes an animal pain, suffering or distress, equivalent or greater than the insertion of a hypodermic needle.

ANIMALS IN UNIVERSITY LABORATORIES • In Britain, 50% of animal experiments are carried out on university campuses.

• In 2017, 3189 Project Licences were issued in the UK allowing animal experimentation. 78% of these were issued to universities.

• In the last decade, there has been a rise of experiments in universities by 6%.

• In 2017, over 813,000 experiments were banded as 'moderate' or 'severe' by the researchers themselves, with over 45,000 causing the most extreme and severe suffering – "testing where death is the end point and/or fatalities are expected".

• The majority of animals used are mice but also primates, birds, rats, reptiles, guinea pigs, ferrets, rabbits, goats, pigs, sheep, cats and dogs are used.

• Over 50% of experiments carried out on monkeys used in UK labs are born in Africa and captured/exported for the sole purpose of experimentation. These are highly intelligent animals who lead lonely, distressing and terrifying lives in cages.

• Animals used for experiments suffer not just the tests, but also solitary confinement, cramped environments and over-crowding in cages, resulting in multi-breeding, fighting, cannibalism and suffocation.

• Laboratory animals are killed by having their necks broken, being gassed with aversive and painful CO2, or having their heads cut off with scissors. Death may not be immediate.

WHY DON’T ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS WORK? • The National Institute of Health (NIH) states that 90% of drugs found to be safe in animal testing fail in human trials because they do not work or are dangerous. e.g. 85 HIV/AIDS vaccines have been successful in primates – yet ALL 85 have failed to offer protection in humans. • To reiterate: 9 out of 10 drugs that start clinical trials fail because of issues with efficacy or safety.

Animals are used for efficacy and safety in drug development. • 90% of all animal research in Britain is classified as ‘Curiosity’, ‘Fundamental’ or ‘Basic Research’. This research does not need to have any tangible benefit to humans. A large number of experiments are stated as ‘Severe’ which means: Testing where death is the end point and/or fatalities are expected. • Over the past few years, researchers have repeatedly shown that animal studies lack scientific rigour and they are often prone to biases – e.g. they are sloppily reported in scientific journals. • In 2018, scientists cite hundreds of biomedical studies from journals, including Nature, Science, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, to show animal modelling is ineffective, misleading to scientists, unable to prevent the development of dangerous drugs, and prone to prevent the development of useful drugs. • Legislationâ€?mandated reliance on animal test results in early stages of the drug development process leads to a mere 10% success rate for new drugs entering human clinical trials. • QUESTION: Experiments on great apes are banned in Europe and the USA. These are our closest relatives, so if animal experiments work, why are we using mice – animals so distant to us in terms of anatomy, physiology and biochemistry?

WHY THEN ARE ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS CARRIED OUT? • Legislation. Laws still require animal testing prior to human testing even though the pharmaceutical sector has better options that were unavailable when animal modelling was first mandated. • Money. Pharma is BIG BUSINESS. Cancer Research and British Heart Foundation fund many university animal experiments, and have an annual income of ÂŁ600 million each. Students are awarded grants from these charities to carry out experiments and publish their papers. • Culture. Researchers continue the same experiments over and over again because this is what they have been taught. They teach their students, and the cycle continues ‌ WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES? ✓ In vitro (test tube) methods and models based on human cell tissue and tissue cultures ✓ Computer models and simulations ✓ Stem cell and genetic testing methods

đ&#x;“şWATCH! Dr Ray Greek’s 2017 lecture on WHY animal experiments don’t work.

Essential viewing for outreach! www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS gbYlSif80

There is no doubt that the best test species for humans is humans. It is not possible to extrapolate animal data to humans due to interspecies variation in anatomy, physiology and biochemistry.