Development of New Medicines and Animal Testing Essay

development of new medicines and verification of safety of the other products. Animal testing has led to prevention of many different diseases, for instance, HIV and Cancer have been made remediable through the use of animal testing. Such testing helps to foresee the catastrophic effects that the drugs might have on humans. A ban on animal testing would cripple the modern medicine and endanger human health. The pros of animal testing outweighs the cons in the discovery of new medicines and regulates the safety of other products available.

Discovery of new drugs

The animal research has led to the discovery of insulin and a vaccine for Hepatitis B which are responsible of saving thousands of lives. Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) claims that the majority of the medical breakthroughs that have happened were a direct result of animal research and experimentation. The California Biomedical Research Association states that the polio vaccine, tested on animals, has helped to reduce the mass spread of the disease from 350,000 cases in 1988 to 223 cases in 2012. Animal research has led to major medical breakthroughs and development of additional cures such as tuberculosis, breast cancer, childhood leukemia, brain injury. Moreover, medical researchers can easily control conditions in animals which helps them better understand the surrounding conditions and substitutes to produce a vaccine which is safe and provides relief to affected population. Such a case ensures that the drug produced improves the quality of human life and reduces human harm. Many medical researcher and scientists are in favor of prior testing of their drugs on animals so that it saves life and improves the quality of human life.

Removing the use of animals from the lab would halt our quality of understanding of health and diseases. The medical researchers will not be able to ensure about the safe passage of the new drug. They will not be able to guarantee if any cosmetic drug has adverse effects on its usage. Without animals, the biomedical researcher will not be able to ascertain the exact amount of Insulin required in order to cure Type I diabetes. Such a situation would make the future of medical development come to a standstill.

Animals are considered as appropriate research subjects because they are similar to human beings in many ways. Animals such as mice and rats share a lot of physiological and generic similarities, for example, mice are 98% genetically similar to human whereas chimpanzee have 99% DNA match with humans. The shorter life span of laboratory mice animals helps the researchers to witness if the cosmetic drug has any adverse effects over the course of 35 years. This makes the researcher proactive and study the effect of the treatment for a whole life of a laboratory mice. Such an advantage makes the use of animals eminent as using human subjects will be infeasible. This makes rats and mice a better choice for conducting a long term cancer research because of their shorter life spans.