And the alternative methods for studying this disease are? Oh wait there are none.

You seem to be living in the misguided illusion that there are alternative methods for all forms for research.

Worse than the SWP when it comes to jumping on every little bandwagon.

Tesco support vivisection anyway by having their toiletries, household products, etc. tested on animals.

The Safer Medicines Campaign does a lot of research into effective, accurate methods of testing new drugs to treat conditions. I suggest you check this organisation out.

Testing on animals isn't safe and it isn't accurate, there is a lot of evidence to support this. Most of us realise that pharmaceutical companies are mainly in the business for the money and they can get massive grants for animal testing.

The reason people don't know much about non-animal testing of drugs, etc. is because the government don't want people to know about it - they're in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. A few years ago, when the Oxford animal lab was still being built, they were prepared to spend £100m on just the building of that lab (that's how much it went up to from the original budget of £18m). At that time, they had given a total of £600,000 to researching non-animal methods.

 http://www.curedisease.net/

Seroxat.. passed animal tests. made kids kill themselves.
Penecilian... no effect on rats. life saving to humans.
Orange juice... delicious to humans. gives rats cancer.
Radial Keratotomy... gave rabbits better sight. made humans blind.
Zomax cured animals with arthritus... killed 14 humans before it was withdrawn.

And don't even get me started on the Novartis drug last year that passed animal test but went on to give pregnant people miscarriages and deformed babies.

and who could forget the elephant men....

Because animal tests really save lives?

Oh logical one, presenting a list of cases where animal experimentation gave either false positive results or failed to warn of negative results would make a good case against animal testing IF the debate were against animal testing making a claim of 100% reliability.

But since we are discussing science, not such claim of absolute certainty is being made and so debunking the NON-EXISTENT claim and arguing that this somehow is supposed to debunk the actaul claim of "effective more often than not, more effective in general than alternatives (and you can't know when the other way around), useful, etc." -- well that's awful logic.

PLEASE NOTE -- this is NOT intended as being in support of animal testing. But the use of invalid argument doesn't really help. To those who want to argue "but TACTICALLY a good idea, might convicne folks easily fooled by rhetorical tricks of false logic" you need to remember that it's the scientists you want to convince.

Ethical arguments against animal testing do not depend on animal testing not working, not being useful, simply on it being "wrong".

>>> Seroxat.. passed animal tests. made kids kill themselves.

True. Also passed tests on adult human volunteers long before it reached the general public, and was subject to continuing clinical trials to monitor the situation once the drug was in general circulation.

In other words, it was NOT simply a matter of testing purely on animals, claiming it was safe for widespread use on humans, then getting off scott-free if it had bad side effects.

So why do you blame purely the animal testing, other than because it supports your animal rights beliefs? The most obvious explanation was that it wasn't tested on children - another ethical minefield.

And to balance against the tragic children, how many lives has Seroxat saved? How many people have been prevented from suicide, and lived long enough to sort out their problems and get on with their lives? It's certainly helped me through a few, mercifully brief and not life-threatening, bad patches.

I'm no fan of the vivisection industry, and certainly don't think that the pharmaceutical industry is run by saints, but failing to recognise the complex scientific and ethical issues here doesn't help the causes of either ending animal experiments or advancing medical knowledge. Medical ethics (of which vivisection is just one of many sensitive issues) is NOT a subject that is ideally suited for people who like to see everything in black-and-white.