1) Less than 2% of human illnesses (1.

16%) are ever seen in

animals. Over 98% never affect animals.
This statement misses the point. The goal of animal testing is to
develop medicines for human conditions and for over 100 years,
we have developed different models to reproduce many of the
features observed in human diseases.
2) According to the former scientific executive of Huntingdon Life
Sciences, animal tests and human results agree 5%-25% of the
time.
Although such statement agrees for certain kinds of diseases
(especially for neurological diseases), this number is much
higher for other diseases, especially cancer research.
3) Among the hundreds of techniques available instead of animal
experiments, cell culture toxicology methods give accuracy rates of
80-85%
In vitro models are great for toxicology screening, but the toxicology
only address a fraction of the drug development. We still have not
good model of disease modeling in a dish, in vitro models to measure
drug ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination).
These are crucial preclinical steps prior clinical studies. Now the
bright side may come from modeling human diseases using patient
induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).
4) 92% of drugs passed by animal tests immediately fail when first
tried on humans because theyre useless, dangerous or both.
Thats the unfortunate condition of translational research, there
is still a big gap between jumping from the bench to the
bedside. However, these information remains very valuable to
determine the doses for the phase I clinical trial (human toxicity
on volounteers) and the failure takes place in Phase II and III
(patients studies). Forecasting such failure early on is as
accurate as a fortune teller.
5) The two most common illnesses in the Western world are lung
cancer from smoking and heart disease. Neither can be reproduced
in lab animals.
Thats some misleading information. According to the WHO, the
top five common illnesses in the world are: heart attack, stroke,
COPD (this is not lung cancer, it is lung alveoli destruction),
lower respiratory infections, tracheal and bronchial diseases.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/
6) A 2004 survey of doctors in the UK showed that 83% wanted a
independent scientific evaluation of whether animal experiments had
relevance to human patients. Less than 1 in 4 (21%) had more
confidence in animal tests than in non-animal methods.
This survey is simply non-sense and rather surprising for
physicians. As good as they are, in vitro models (as non-animal
methods) are and still remains an oversimplification (1 to 5
different cells in a dish) of the whole organism (100+ different
cell types interconnected).
7) Rats are 37% effective in identifying what causes cancer to
humans less use than guessing. The experimenters said: we
would have been better off to have tossed a coin.
Rats are not great in vivo model of cancer, because there is no
immune-deficient rats (their immune system will kill human
cancer fast) and even some rat strain (like the Fisher F344) have
spontaneous tumor formation following aging (the famous junk
study from Seralini). The most common model is the mouse
xenograft, using SCID nude mice, in which we inject human
cancer cells.
8) Rodents are the animals almost always used in cancer research.
They never get carcinomas, the human form of cancer, which affects
membranes (eg lung cancer). Their sarcomas affect bone and
connective tissue: the two are completely different.
False, See answer 7
9) The results from animal tests are routinely altered radically by diet,
light, noise, temperature, lab staff and bedding. Bedding differences
caused cancer rates of over 90% and almost zero in the same strain
of mice at different labs.
Misleading statement, see answer 7.
10)Sex differences among lab animals can cause contradictory
results. This does not correspond with humans.
Although true, this statement is also misleading. Experiments
have been biased to include only one gender (male) and
dismissed to observe if same effect was also observed in the
other gender. There is an increasing call in the science
community to have a gender-equal studies including both males
and females in their studies.

11) 75% of side effects identified in animals never occur.

Side effects are never observed in animals, only toxicological
data. Side effects get documented on Phase I clinical trials,
done on healthy voulounteers and in the subsequent phases.
12) Over half of side effects cannot be detected in lab animals.
75+50=125%! Redundant statement and discussed in 11.
13) Vioxx was shown to protect the heart of mice, dogs, monkeys and
other lab animals. It was linked to heart attacks and strokes in up to
139,000 humans.
Thats an unfortunate consequence of inter-species variation
and the persistant problem of data reproducibility. This is
always the problem once you have your drug FDA-approval, you
are jumping from a small scale of patients (maximum 10000) to
the whole population. In case of Vioxx, we estimate 25 millions
of users got the Vioxx. You have now 25 millions individual that
have their individual DMPK profile, also known as
polymorphism, that may have been missed during trial. Thus it
is important to have a pharmacovigilance by the healthcare
system to report any side or adverse effect to minimize the
gravity of the situation and remove the drug if the risk overcome
the benefits.
14) Genetically modified animals are not like humans. The mdx
mouse is supposed to have muscular dystrophy, but the muscles
regenerate with no treatment.
Thats a caveat of animal models but there were no alternative
until now. The recent development of stem cell research, in
particular diseases modeling using iPSCs may help change the
tide and find better drug candidates than existing models.
15) GM animal the CF- mouse never gets fluid infections in the lungs
the cause of death for 95% of human cystic fibrosis patients.
Thats the problem inherent to lab animals husbandry and
housing. Animal housing undergo severe and drastic, highly
controlled environment that often discount the environmental
factors encountered by patients. This is inherent to scientific
testing: a stable and reproducible environment to isolate the
effect of the disease alone rather than being driven by
numerous variables.
16) In America, 106,000 deaths a year are attributed to reactions to

medical drugs.
Redundant, See 13.
17) Each year 2.1 million Americans are hospitalised by medical
treatment.
What is this number mean? Is it the number of American
hospitalized for injuries or diseases conditions or admissions
due to complications due to medical procedures?
18) In the UK an estimated 70,000 people are killed or severely
disabled every year by unexpected reactions to drugs. All these drugs
have passed animal tests.
Redundant, See 13.
19) In the UKs House Of Lords questions have been asked regarding
why unexpected reactions to drugs (which passed animal tests) kill
more people than cancer.
Redundant, See 13.
20) A German doctors congress concluded that 6% of fatal illnesses
and 25% of organic illness are caused by medicines. All have been
animal tested.
Redundant, See 13.
21) According to a thorough study, 88% of stillbirths are caused by
drugs which passed animal tests.
Correlation is not causation. Pregnant women medication
regimen is very restricted and limited, cannot explain this
number. There are multicausal and involves various causes
such as birth defects (20%), placental problems (25%), poor
growth due to tobacco or other substance abuses (40%)
infections (up to 25%).
http://www.marchofdimes.org/loss/stillbirth.aspx
22) 61% of birth defects were found to have the same cause.
False. Fallacious claim, see 21.
23) 70% of drugs which cause human birth defects are safe in
pregnant monkeys.
Testing on primates (monkeys are misnomers and do not
precise which primates are we referring) testing is very limited
due to important ethical issues, expenses and facilities
requirement to host these animals.
24) 78% of foetus-damaging chemicals can be detected by one nonanimal test.

PETA is simply clueless on this one and never heard about

thalidomide and the outbreak of phocomelia before, because it
was only tested in rats (rabbits showed the same theratogenic
effects after the outbreak), thus we need two different species
for toxicology testing.
25) Thousands of safe products cause birth defects in lab animals
including water, several vitamins, vegetable oils, oxygen and drinking
waters. Of more than 1000 substances dangerous in lab animals,
over 97% are safe in humans.
Thats some words mish-mash. The dose makes the poison and
we use animal testing as a precautionary tale. Case of
theobromin (contain in chocolate) capable to kill a rat, the
amount ingested by humans remains minimal before feeling bad
from chocolate overeating.
26) One of the most common lifesaving operation (for ectopic
pregnancies) was delayed 40 years by vivisection.
Ectopic pregnancy is a dangerous situation that can lead to
internal bleeding and death. Ethically, we cannot train surgeons
on humans.
27) The great Dr Hadwen noted had animal experiments been relied
uponhumanity would have been robbed of this great blessing of
anaesthesia.
The citation has been truncated and therefore is partially valid
as it is taken out of context. However, since the 1950s, the
scientific community has been developing awareness about
animal experiments and animal testings. This lead to the
development of the 3R policy: Reduce, Refine, Replace with
the goal to replace and/or reduce the usage of animals only to
experiments that cannot be done with current in vitro models
and using the minimal number of animals to achieve statistical
power. Animal experimentation is an exhaustive administrative
processing overseen by institutional animal committees
themselve overseen by state and federal agencies. Such
regulatory oversight ensure that these experiments are
essential, done in the right environment with an outmost
respect on the animal welfare, ensure the animal are treated in
an humane manner by qualified and trained personnels, with
endopoints to euthanize animals when the sufferance is not

justified.
28) Aspirin fails animal tests, as do digitalis (heart drug), cancer
drugs, insulin (which causes animal birth defects), penicillin and other
safe medicines. They would be banned if vivisection were believed.
Wrong statements. Aspirin, digoxin (from the digitalis), insulin
and penicillin therapeutical activities were done before the
onset of modern scientific experimentation (1940s-present).
29) Blood transfusions were delayed 200 years by animal studies.
Wrong statement. Harvey (1628) discovered the circulatory
system and believed to have realized the first transfusion.
Transfusion was delayed due to the ABO system, leading to
hemolytic transfusion due to blood incompatibility (A donor
cannot give to a B receiver, bypassing will lead to the receiver).
Karl Landsteiner (1901) was the scientist to discover and
classify blood type known as the ABO system.
30) The polio vaccine was delayed 40 years by monkey tests.
Wrong, the polio virus was only identified in 1908 by Karl
Landsteiner. The polio vaccine was delayed due to the lack of
proper human cell line capable to host and allow the virus to
multiply to produce enough viral particles to create vaccines.
This was developed by Jonas Salk in 1952. The vaccine was
licensed in 1955 and allowed to decrease the number of cases
from 35000 (1953) to 5000 (1957).
31) 30 HIV vaccines, 33 spinal cord damage drugs, and over 700
treatments for stroke have been developed in animals. None work in
humans.
Neurological disorders and HIV are very hard to treat are they
are human-specific and lack good animal models of the
diseases. Primates constitutes better model but have important
ethical and logistic challenges.
32) Despite many Nobel prizes going to vivisectors, only 45% agree
that animal experiments are crucial.
Source needed. Again, this case has been debunked in several
times in this documents.
33) The Director of Research Defence Society, (which serves only to
defend vivisection) was asked if medical progress could have been
achieved without animal use. His written reply was I am sure it could
be.

This is the hope of many scientists, to have either an in vitro or

an in silico lab animal models. We have been decreasing the
number of animals and we came from far in a century. It will take
time but pressing on 3R policy, encouraging research funding
using non-animal models can help curb the usage of animals in
research.
http://speakingofresearch.com/facts/statistics/