Disclosure that dichlorvos (DDVP), an ingredient of almost 50 leading brands of insect killers, is a suspected cause of skin, liver and breast cancer is further evidence that using laboratory animals is an ineffective way of testing the safety of household and industrial products.

The chemical industry will, no doubt, concoct a substitute ingredient and inflict that upon more hapless laboratory animals in the expectation consumers will be assured by such meaningless experiments.

-Peter Allen, Worthing