Animal Testing

Animal Testing

In the world that we live in today, medical experts still have yet to come up with a cure for certain medical mysteries, for example, there is still no cure for AIDS, and researchers say “animal experimentation benefits AIDS research” (Animal Experimentation, p. 13). They relay on the testing of animals in laboratories to help find a cure. While yet many people think that we don’t have to test on animals, they don’t know that it could very well help us find the cure. So many people ask this question- why support it? Many support it because researchers claim that they can find medicine/vaccines for diseases such as AIDS and Parkinson’s.

Parkinson’s disease is one of the reasons that researchers find it necessary to test on animals. “Parkinson's disease is the most common cause of parkinsonism, a group of disorders that share common symptoms and pathophysiology. Parkinsonism may result from brain injury, disease of exposure to toxins. In what became known as "The case of the Frozen Addicts"-heroin users presented at various Northern California emergency rooms with symptoms indistinguishable from those of Parkinson's, caused by the presence of MPTP in their drug supply. It was soon demonstrated that MPTP induces a specific loss of substantia nigra neurons that mimics the degeneration seen in Parkinson's disease2. MPTP has an identical effect on monkeys and while parkinsonism induced by MPTP is not usually permanent the MPTP monkey has since proved to be an excellent, if not exact, experimental model for Parkinson's disease” (Pro-Test). This shows that monkeys are in fact a very excellent model in trying to come up with a cure for Parkinson’s disease.

Medical researchers are working for the health of us all, and scientists agree that whenever a cure for AIDS is found, it will be through animal research. Animal activists condemn the experiment as morally wrong