Against Animal Testing

This essay will put forward some of the arguments for and against animal testing using data and information from published articles to develop an unbiased and balanced conclusion.

One of the arguments for animal testing is that certain cosmetics and medicines have to be tested on animals to certify their safety. For example in China, they feel the necessity for all cosmetics to be tested on animals before they go on sale, so companies have to do this before they are able to distribute it across the country. Some products like mosquito repellent must go through toxicological testing which involves testing it on animals before it can be sold in the US or Europe. The US Food and Drug Administration recommends the use of animal testing on makeup

If vaccines were not tested on animals, a multitude of animals would have died from rabies, feline leukaemia, contagious hepatitis virus and canine parvovirus. Cures for animals refined using animal trials also consist of pacemakers for heart disease and remedies for eye diseases and diseases that prohibit movement. Animal testing could help save endangered species for example, the likes of koalas, eradicated by an epidemic of sexually transmitted chlamydia and now classified as endangered in some regions of Australia, are being tested with new chlamydia vaccines that may halt the animal's

We may have lost out on drugs that could be very advantageous to humans due to the fact to they would have or could have been detrimental to the animals they would have been tested on. A June 1, 2006 report on Slate.com stated that a "source of human suffering may be the dozens of promising drugs that get shelved when they cause problems in animals that may not be relevant for humans.” For example, a drug used to lower the threat of organ transplant rejection, was "almost shelved" because of animal test results, according to neurologist Aysha Akhtar, MD, MPH.

An argument for animal testing is animals are adequate research subjects because they resemble human beings in many ways. One of these animals are chimpanzees due to the fact that they share 99% of their DNA with humans this is because all mammals including humans are descended from common ancestors and all have the same set of organs (heart,kidneys,etc) that function essentially in an identical way with the help of a bloodstream and central nervous system. Since animal and humans are so biologically comparable, they are receptive to many of the same conditions and diseases, like heart disease and