The recent maligning of animal rights campaigners by the Government and pharma moguls (The Argus, July 30) diverts attention from the brutal reality of animal research.
Experimentation in labs happens behind closed doors, without any accountability or openness.
According to Home Office statistics, the number of animal experiments has increased by four per cent since 2001 and many of these have nothing to do with "vital medical research" but concentrate on household products, food additives, agricultural toxicology and even military experiments.
In their perennial search for the Holy Grail, pharmaceutical companies instruct research centres, such as Huntingdon Life Sciences, to mutilate and poison animals but we still have not found any cures for cancer, Aids or Parkinsons.
In many instances, animal research has led to delays and erroneous conclusions in medical breakthroughs. According to reports in the British Medical Journal and New Scientist, animal-tested drugs are the fourth biggest killer in the western world.
It isn't even safe or predictive to extrapolate drug dosages from adults to children, so how "scientific" is it to experiment on another species?
-Hella Gamper, Crowborough
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