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Human science vs. humane science

By Marieen Vijay

We need to examine how valid bio-medical research is in India in the context of the observation of April 24 as World Laboratory Animal Day. Due to several advances in the methodology of international scientific research, there has been a shift away from the needless use of animals in scientific research. However, despite these developments, certain outdated practices continue in India while the rest of the world has discarded them.

Fact: More than 20 years after the WHO recommended the worldwide ban on the use of the Neural Tissue (NTV or sheep brain) anti-rabies vaccine, the Ministry of Health continues to fund nine biological production centres (producing 35,000 litres of NTV) and encourages its use. The many complicated and harmful side effects affect at least one in 200 patients. Every country in the world with the exception of India and Tunisia has switched over to the WHO-recommended Tissue Culture Vaccine.

In the rapidly advancing world of bio-medical research, animal experiments are becoming more sophisticated with the increasing need for more precise results. To achieve these results, the animals themselves must be of high genetic and microbiological definition. Therefore, governments and universities abroad invest millions of dollars on the improvement of animal care facilities and pass stringent laws on animal testing.

Why is there a growing misgiving in the international scientific community as scientists fumble with wrong inferences drawn from using animals in research? There is a growing worry that animals housed in artificial, cruelly deprived environments, denied natural foods and exercise, developing bizarre dysfunctions, and physiological stress would definitely give invalid and therefore fatal conclusions about the hypotheses being researched.

It should be a matter of concern to everyone that the results obtained from animal testing often do not replicate in humans. In most of the universities, research scholars or even post-graduate students have been made to understand that the easiest way of conducting research is to feed some toxin or product to a set of animals and look up some of the parameters to submit a thesis. The sole objective is to acquire a degree or a publication no matter how dubious its worth.

What they do is illegal. In the European Union, all students or researchers planning an animal experiment necessarily have to undergo a training in Laboratory Animal Science, wherein they are taught to plan a valid study using statistical methodologies to arrive at all the inputs they require and in the right quantities so as to achieve meaningful data. The trained person is given a licence for a specified period to carry out the experiments. In India most often the concept of using appropriate animal models and a well-designed experimental protocol does not exist.

The animals that are experimented on are required to be procured from breeders registered with the CPCSEA (Committee for the purpose of control and supervision of experiments on animals.) However, instead most animals found in laboratories have just been rounded up from the street or procured from illegal sources.

This is not a human vs. animals issue as our "scientists" are trying to pretend. The issues raised have more to do with corruption, fakery and lack of science than about cruelty to animals.

India has produced only 14 new drugs in 55 years and even these have been rejected abroad. How many research articles from India get published in reputed international journals? Hardly any, though India spends not less than Rs. 5,000 crores a year on "research". The CAG report of August 2001 on the state of science in the country reveals that of the 338 experiments conducted in 1988 by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), 133 had still to be written up in 2001, by which time they were obsolete! Do we not deserve a better health system?

With the progress in genetic engineering, it is possible to cultivate human and animal cells and use them to study structure, functional or pharmacological activity. No single method can be expected to cover the complexity of human reactions though. The MEIC 4 Cell Tests gives results with 80 per cent precision and is the most efficient predictor of human acute and chronic toxicity as against THE 65 per cent of animal test data.

In India, however much the large companies cry out that animal welfare issues are holding back the development of the pharmaceutical industry, the fact is that the sale of bulk drugs which require little or no research has been the mainstay of Indian pharmaceutical companies. In the last year, several herbal formulations have had to be withdrawn from the Indian markets due to adverse and harmful reactions in humans.

Even small differences between species can have morphological and physiological consequences leading to huge differences at the cellular level, which is where we focus when we treat disease. These minute differences can lead to lethal errors when applying animal-model based data to humans.

(The writer is working for the basic rights of laboratory animals along with People for Animals, Chennai Chapter)

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