
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 30, 1990                   TAG: 9005300399
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: NEAL D. BARNARD, M.D.
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ANIMAL-RESEARCH WASTE, ABUSE

AS A PHYSICIAN who is concerned about medical progress and the welfare of animals, I am compelled to respond to Paxton Davis' column May 4. In his indiscriminate defense of animal research, he fails to acknowledge the significant problems of waste and abuse prevalent in science today. His reactionary stance promotes neither human health nor animal protection.

"The National Institutes of Health gives away more than $5 billion a year for research," wrote investigative journalist Jack Anderson. "Whether that money is well spent is anybody's guess. For the most part, NIH blindly trusts that the money went for credible research."

In fact, according to U.S. Rep. John Dingell, whose subcommittee on oversight and investigations has held hearings on scientific fraud and misconduct, the NIH has only one and a half staff persons to monitor the 50,000 scientific and academic institutions that receive federal research monies.

This carte-blance atmosphere, combined with the pressure to publish and obtain grants, has created a system in which studies with questionable relevance to human health are routinely approved and executed. Animals are the innocent victims of this heartless and wasteful bureaucracy, and their suffering is profound.

Barbaric head-trauma experiments at the University of Cincinnati and the University of Pennsylvania, in which the skulls of thousands of cats and primates were crushed, have been halted. Funding for drug addiction experiments, which subjected cats to the horrors of chemical withdrawal, was returned by a Cornell University researcher.

In each case, physicians and scientists joined animal advocates in criticizing the studies for their scientific irrelevance and cruelty. Recently, Congress suspended funds for a $2.1 million Army research project at Louisiana State University, in which 700 cats were shot in the head, because the experiments duplicated findings that have been known to medicine for nearly a century.

Meanwhile, the inadequacy of animal models of human disease is increasingly coming to light.

The American Medical Association's council on scientific affairs wrote in 1981 that it is "concerned about the hundreds of millions of dollars that are spent each year for the carcinogenicity testing of chemical substances [in rodents]."

An editorial in the medical journal Stroke (January 1990) cautioned, "Each time one of these treatments [for stroke] is observed to be effective based upon animal research, it propagates numerous further animal and human studies, consuming enormous time and effort to prove that the observation has little or no relevance to human disease."

"There is no animal model for cystic fibrosis," warned Irwin B. Levitan, biochemist at Brandeis University, in Science.

"The lack of an appropriate animal model for [AIDS] research makes the application of animal research to humans uncertain," concluded the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus in its June 1988 report.

There are thousands of physicians and medical professionals across the nation who believe that the animal-rights movement, now 10 million people strong, is raising important issues and forcing important changes.

by CNB