Animal Rights and Medical Experiments Essay:
The use of animals for scientific purposes in medical experiments to receive a better understanding of a particular disease, to develop new drugs or to check the security of a drug raises many conflicting reactions. Some people strongly believe that there are no moral problems in this issue, while the others rush in the opposite direction with extreme opinions ready to justify animal welfare as a whole with violence. In fact, a recent survey of public opinion found that, for instance, citizens of the United Kingdom either refer to the experiments on animals with disapproval and cautiously, or believe that they should be banned completely. Still, even though there are a lot of people who can provide stable and considerable arguments to both sides of the argument around the world it is clear that abandoning animal experiments is a dubious decision since in the 21st century it is the only way to prevent human experiments.
First of all, experiments on animals present a huge industry. Each year only British scientists use almost 3 million of animals for research purposes. Most often these are rats and mouse, but 1% of them includes rabbits, and 0.1% – monkeys. Mostly, these animals are used for development and testing of medicines to treat human disease, although every year about 17,000 animals are used to verify the safety of food supplements and household equipment chemistry. At the same time, there is a fact that now a number of animals exposed to similar experiments is significantly reduced (Rowan 79). However, in addition to all this, undoubtedly, there is a negative side of this issue since, for instance, the Ministry of Defense can test different types of weapons on animals almost without publishing such data. Still, generally, traditional tests on animals gradually taper to nothing, and there are new areas of experimental study (Mukerjee 94). For example, now more animals are used for experiments on gene engineering (Anderegg et al. 6). In some cases, human genes are implanted in an animal. Such transgenic animals can develop diseases which are very similar to human diseases. Studying impact of the disease on the body of transgenic animals, scientists can find out the causes of human diseases. Consequently, this gives them much more opportunities to develop new types of treatment of several human diseases (Rowan 79). Continue reading →
