Should animal research be continued?
Animal testing is important because it would not be morally right to give a human a substance that had never been given or tested on a living organism before. We need to test and identify any side effects as accurately as possible before giving the medicine to any human being. Millions of animals such as dogs, rats, rabbits, mice, and cats are being tested in laboratories for human research. Animal research still remains to be a controversial topic but it has helped develop many vaccines and cures for diseases. The increase attention that animal research got led to Britain banning it for cosmetic use in 1998. Animal research should only be continued under safe conditions for the animals where they are provided with love and care. Without animal testing we would never know if Tylenol was safe to give to our children, and no one wants to risk that.
Animal testing has helped contribute too many life-saving cures and treatments. Many medical treatments have been made possible because of animal testing such as cancer and HIV drugs, insulin, antibiotics, vaccines and many more. The vaccine named polio was tested on animals and it helped reduce the global occurrence by thousands. We would have never found a vaccine for hepatitis B which kills more than 15,000 people every year if we didn’t test on chimpanzees.
Animals can benefit from the testing. If we would have never tested on animals then we wouldn’t find treatments for rabies and infectious viruses. Animal testing has also been saving endangered species from extinction. Koalas were going extinct by an epidemic of sexually transmitted chlamydia and now are being tested with new chlamydia vaccines that may help bring back many of the koalas.
Animals are very similar to humans. Chimpanzees and mice share up to 98-99% of their DNA with humans. All mammals such as humans are descended from the common ancestors, and all have the same set of organs like a heart, kidneys, lungs, and etc. They function in the same way with a bloodstream and central nervous system because animals and humans are so biologically similar, they can get the same conditions and illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.
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