THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 3, 1996 TAG: 9608030005
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: By MICHAEL E. CAREY
LENGTH: 80 lines
I was a neurosurgeon in Vietnam in 1968-69. Day and night, helicopters brought wounded soldiers to the hospital where our neurosurgical unit operated on more than 100 Americans with brain injuries each year. As young men died before my eyes, I began to wonder if we could have saved them it we had known more. I wondered, too, what would become of those who lived after they left our hospital with healing brains and spirits. Their faces wouldn't leave my memory.
So after returning, I followed up on all 93 survivors on whom our neurosurgical team had operated. Some came to the medical school where I am a faculty member. We assessed their brain function and general well-being, and I met with all of them and their wives. While many had some paralysis, amputations or partial blindness, I was relieved and inspired that most were able to do what they had planned before they entered military service. What a story of resiliency these veterans and their wives told.
I studied the literature and was amazed to discover that fewer than 25 laboratory research reports on brain wounds caused by bullets or shrapnel had ever been written worldwide, while there were thousands of experimental papers on stroke patients. Clearly almost nothing was known about brain wounding in modern biological terms to help people with such injuries. How could our government send young men and women off to wars without knowing the best way to treat brain wounds? Could we learn better ways to treat the more than 25,000 American civilians who get gunshot wounds of the brain each year?
To help solve this important problem, I received a contract from the Army to study the effects of a standardized small brain wound in anesthetized cats. My research team observed the physiological changes after the sudden disruption of brain tissue and blood vessels. This kind of research cannot be done in a computer model, or on cells floating in a petri dish. It requires a living, breathing animal in order to find what treatments may lead to more complete recovery for living, breathing humans.
Soon the animal-rights zealots stepped in - in a big way. They began bombarding my medical school and Congress with an international letter-writing campaign. Naively, I had thought most people could see through this tactic; I took comfort from a Gallup Poll showing that 75 percent of Americans support the use of animals to advance medical science. But I was wrong.
An animal-rights group printed false information claiming our research animals did not receive anesthesia. Of course we used anesthesia, because we did not want to inflict pain. Indeed, a panel of experts in brain research convened by the General Accounting Office wrote that my research was important and should continue. This panel found no evidence that animals suffered. Our cats - nobody's pets - were procured from licensed dealers. They were humanely handled in strict accordance with Department of Agriculture regulations, and their care conformed to the high standards of the American Association for the Advancement of Laboratory Animal Care. Members of Congress, however, responded to animal activists' sensational, deceitful propaganda by cutting off the funding for my research.
Just after Congress closed our brain-wound laboratory, I was recalled as an Army Medical Corps officer for Operation Desert Storm. I returned to active duty in December 1990 at a forward field hospital in Saudi Arabia. It was clear that I would have to treat young Americans with brain wounds with no better techniques than those I used in Vietnam in 1969.
Mike Wallace and his staff at ``60 Minutes'' also wondered what happened to my research. Their investigation (first aired Jan. 24, 1993) showed how lies printed in magazines that appeal to pet owners get orchestrated into volumes of letters and calls to Congress from animal lovers. The politicians are cleverly manipulated by organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which is adamantly against animal testing. Even peer-reviewed, Defense Department-funded research projects on war injuries have been stopped by pressure on Congress and threats against researchers and their families - as happened to me and my wife, Betty Oseid, a pediatrician. The development of new antibiotics, vaccines, drugs for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, and improved treatments for AIDS, diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease will stop if appropriate animals cannot be used for research.
One wonders why such a small number of misguided people hold such power over politicians and opinion makers. Perhaps it's time for a majority of Americans to speak out in favor of biomedical research to save human lives and decrease human suffering. I wonder, does People for the Ethical Treatment of Humans have a good ring to it?
KEYWORDS: PETA by CNB