God made monkeys and rats for animal testing, Malaysian official says

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — A Malaysian government official defended an Indian company's plans to build an animal testing medicine lab in his state, saying Monday that God created monkeys and rats for experiments to benefit humans.

The plans by India's Vivo BioTech to set up a biotechnology center in southern Malacca state has come under fire by activists because it will conduct tests on dogs and primates to make medicines. The activists say Malaysia has no regulations on animal research, which could lead to test subjects being abused.

But Malacca Chief Minister Mohamad Ali Rustam said the lab had received state approval, and animal testing was necessary to make drugs. The project is still in the planning phase.

"God created animals for the benefits of human beings. That's why he created rats and monkeys. ... We cannot test on human beings," he told the Associated Press. "This is the way it has to be. God created monkeys, and some have to be tested."

He said Malaysian agencies, such as the wildlife department, could monitor that the animals were not abused and proper procedures followed. He said eating animals also could be seen as cruel, and yet it was widely accepted.

Vivo inked a $141 million joint-venture deal in January to build the biotechnology center, including laboratories where trial medicines will be tested on animals. Its partners are state-government-owned Melaka Biotech Holdings and local firm Vanguard Creative Technologies.

Malaysia's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals slammed Mohamad Ali's statement, saying it had not been scientifically proven that animal testing was necessary to develop medicine.

"Our primates will be snatched from the forests to be tested for what? Animal testing really leads to nowhere," group representative Christine Chin-Radford said Monday.

"We are not confident at all that ... their welfare will be looked at properly. We are concerned about this exportation of cruelty to Malaysia," Chin-Radford said.

SPCA, together with European animal rights groups, submitted a protest letter to the government last month, urging it to halt the project. Chin-Radford said animal cruelty is against Malaysian law, and there are no separate guidelines to govern the treatment of test animals.

Animal rights activists say companies are increasingly outsourcing animal testing to Asia, where regulations are more lax and costs are lower than in the West. India also has strict rules concerning animal testing, Chin-Radford said.

Vivo has said previously it may import beagles from Holland and try to obtain domestic primates for testing.

Last year, a French pharmaceutical research company proposed building an animal testing laboratory in southern Johor state using imported macaques, but the project was suspended amid an outcry from environmental groups.

RELATED NEWS ABOUT ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION:
Judge bars construction of controversial monkey-breeding facility in Puerto Rico
Activists clash (peacefully) over animal testing at UCLA (2009)

-- Julia Zappei, Associated Press

Photo: Iris Schneider / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[KGSM]

If God were smart - he'd rid this earth of all the humans!!! All we do is ruin things!!! Granted, there's a lot of good in the world. But my goodness, there is an awful lot of bad. And the bad, is really bad. The animals aren't in the cages, the animals are the one's doing the experiments!!!

[woof-woof]

I am not a vegetarian, so it's hard for me to condemn the use of animals in research. Using animals for science seems somewhat more worthwhile than over-using them to get fat.

[noratmedicine]

Animal experiments do not benefit humans anyway. Theyve even paid the animal rights movement to keep this an animal rights issue and not a real science versus fraud (animal experiments) issue google 'ajudem nos singer rockefeller vivisection' for more

DRUGS
"92% of new drugs fail in clinical trials, after they have passed all the safety tests in animals" US FDA (2004) "Innovation or Stagnation, Challenge and Opportunity on the Critical Path to new Medical Products" (36).

"A drug that is tested in animals will have a completely different effect in man. There are uncounted examples that could be cited." (Dr. med. Karlheinz Blank) Lord Platt, President of the Royal College of Physicians said "No amount of animal testing can make a drug safe because humans react differently from animals." The report of the british pharmaceutical industries expert committee on drug toxicity said "Information from one animal species cannot be taken as valid for any other. It is not a matter of balancing the cruelty and suffering of animals against the gain of humanity spared from the suffering, because that is not the choice. Animals die to enable hundreds of new drugs to be marketed annually, but the gain is to industry, not mankind." Dr Herbert Gundersheimer, "Results from animal tests are not transferable between species, and therefore cannot guarantee product safety for humans…In reality these tests do not provide protection for consumers from unsafe products, but rather are used to protect corporations from legal liability." Report of the Medical Research Council "It must be emphasized that it is impossible to extrapolate quantitatively from one species to any other species." The Lancet, "We know from drug toxicity studies that animals are very imperfect indicators of human toxicity: only clinical experience and careful control of the introduction of new drugs can tell us about their real dangers." Dr Ralph Heywood, former scientific director of huntington life sciences, one of the largest contract research laboratories in the world speaking to the CIBA Foundation said "The best guess for the correlation of adverse toxic reactions between human and animal data is somewhere between 5% and 25%" and "90% of our work is done for legal and not for scientific reasons."
So the USFDA, from drug co's own data on millions of animals over decades indicates that animals are incorrect in determining drug toxicity for humans 92% of the time. It is a legal device, not a scientific one.

Microdosing is method of drug testing that workd and therefore does not use animals. Pharmagene or Asterand are making genetically engineered drugs made for individuals as drug effects vary between humans

CANCER from Campaign Against Fraudulent Medical Research www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr

"Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud and that the major cancer research organisations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them." - Linus Pauling PhD (Two-time Nobel Prize winner). Dr A. Sabin, creator of the vaccine of his name said, "It is time to end cancer research on animals because it is not related to humans." And Dr Irwin Bross in Fundamental and Applied Toxicology "The moral is that animal model systems not only kill animals they also kill humans. There is no good factual evidence to show that the use of animals in cancer research has led to the prevention or cure of a single human cancer." And Dr J F Brailsford "During the past fifty years scientists experimenting with thousands of animals have found 700 ways of causing cancer. But they had not discovered one way of curing the disease."

Have you ever wondered why, despite the billions of dollars spent on cancer research over many decades, and the constant promise of a cure which is forever "just around the corner", cancer continues to increase?
Cancer Is Increasing

Once quite rare, cancer is now the second major cause of death in Western countries such as Australia, the U.S.A. and the United Kingdom. In the early 1940s cancer accounted for 12% of Australian deaths. (1)ref # d'Espaignet, E.T. et al., Trends in Australian Mortality 1921-1988, Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), Canberra, 1991, p. 33

By 1992 this figure had climbed to 25.9% of Australian deaths. (2)ref # Australian Bureau of Statistics, Causes of Death, Australia 1992, ABS, Canberra, 1993, p.1

and from safer med. campaign,
Given substances are not necessarily carcinogenic to all species. Studies show that 46% of chemicals found to be carcinogenic in rats were not carcinogenic in mice. [23] If species as closely related as mice to rats do not even contract cancer similarly, it's not surprising that 19 out of 20 compounds that are safe for humans caused cancer in animals. [24]

The US National Cancer Institute treated mice growing 48 different "human" cancers with a dozen different drugs proven successful in humans, and in 30 of the cases, the drugs were useless in mice. Almost two-thirds of the mouse models were wrong. Animal experimentation is not scientific because it is not predictive.

The US National Cancer Institute also undertook a 25 year screening programme, testing 40,000 plant species on animals for anti-tumour activity. Out of the outrageously expensive research, many positive results surfaced in animal models, but not a single benefit emerged for humans. As a result, the NCI now uses human cancer cells for cytotoxic screening.[25]

Dr. Richard Klausner, as director of the US National Cancer Institute, plainly states:

"The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse... We have cured mice of cancer for decades - and it simply didn't work in humans."
refs 23# DiCarlo DrugMet Rev,15; p409-131984.
24# Mutagenesis1987;2:73-78.
25# Handbook of Laboratory Animal Science, Volume II Animal Models Svendensen and Hau (Eds.) CRC Press 1994 p4.

animal tests do not identify human carcionogens, even warnings on cigarette packets were delayed for 10 years due to animal 'tests' and 180 years for arsenic, also asbestos, literally thousands of human carcinogens. legal not scientific

animal res. isn't undertaken on a whim, getting published, qualifications, income and legal protection are major motives. even noble motives though do not lead to worthwhile results ie cures or protecting humans.

AIDS. from dr ray greek http://www.navs.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7753
"According to the February 20, 2009 issue of Science:

SIVcpz, the chimpanzee virus that infected humans and triggered the AIDS epidemic, caused no harm to apes. But new data reveal that wild chimps infected with SIVcpz are more likely to die than are uninfected chimps . . . Captive chimps experimentally infected with HIV-1 typically suffer no harm, which led several researchers to propose that chimps had lived with SIVcpz for centuries and that their immune systems had evolved to coexist with the virus. But few SIVcpz- infected chimps in the wild were identified until about a decade ago . . .

We hear all the time about a new breakthrough using animals. What often goes unreported in the news is that a vast majority of these fail to translate to humans. Since HIV was isolated researchers have been experimenting with nonhuman primates seeking a vaccine or cure. Neither have been found; for humans. Many vaccines and preventive measures have been found for monkeys. Yet the NIH continues to fund experiments on a different species suffering from a different virus.

Animals are not going to be predictive for humans because:

1.
animals and humans have different genes;
2.
animals and humans control and express the same genes differently;
3.
animals and humans live in different external environments (notice that wild chimpanzees are apparently susceptible to SIVcpz while captive chimps were not);
4.
animals and humans live in different internal environments (even if we all had the same gene, how all those genes and proteins interact would be different);
5.
even if animals and humans suffered from exactly the same virus in exactly the same fashion it does not follow they will respond similarly to the same treatment because different biochemical pathways may be involved.

The above differences highlight why monkeys are no better predictors for humans than are our more distant relatives, mice. A percentage of genetic similarity does not imply predictive ability...."

monkeys dont get aids so no point experimenting on them, same for all other human disease and all animal experiments. humans and animals only get the same diseases 1.16% of the time.

[Emma of Victoria Australia]

What an absolutely ludicrous way of attempting to justify the unethical practice of animal experimentation..."god made rats and monkeys for animal testing". I dont think anyone believes such rubbish in 2010.

Using animals as human models is not only a mammoth waste of time, money and resources; nor is it only a cruel and callous act; but it is outright dangerous to humans. It is completely unscientific. If it told us anything about the way a human body would metabolise a given substance, then why bother with clinical trials, and why not put the drug straight on the shelf? And why have seperate medicines for animals? Why not take ourselves to the vet when sick, and animals to the doctor? Why are there different medicines for cats and dogs? Could it be species difference?

There are alternatives to many animal tests. Where there is not, they need to be developed. Using animals just because there is not alternative will not achieve anything.

STOP ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS AND FOCUS ON HUMANS YOU IDIDOTS!!

[Markus]

There is a lot of evidence that shows animal testing is not necessary for drug development. This is due mainly due to the large differences between animal and human physiology. The drugs behave so differently in animal bodies that it renders much of the data obtained from animal testing moot.

[Skye - Australia]

Mohamad Ali Rustam is clearly talking complete rubbish.

Why does he believe it is unacceptable to test on humans, while it IS acceptable to test on animals? ....ah God... riiiiight.

He is promoting animal abuse for profit. That's the bottom line.

Thanks NoRatMedicine for providing some real facts as opposed to Mohamad Ali Rustam's statement above (i.e. "God made me do it...").

The Malaysian government must immediately block Vivo BioTech's plan to test on animals in Malaysia.

Animals are not ours to use or abuse.