What are the pros and cons of animal testing?

[anna]

What are the pros and cons of animal testing?

[jaki]

Yes-
1. Animal testing has helped to develop vaccines against diseases like rabies, polio, measles, mumps, rubella and TB.
2. Antibiotics, HIV drugs, insulin and cancer treatments rely on animal tests. Other testing methods aren't advanced enough.
3. Scientists claim there are no differences in lab animals and humans that cannot be factored into tests.
4. Operations on animals helped to develop organ transplant and open-heart surgery techniques.

No-
1. Animal experiments can be misleading. An animal's response to a drug can be different to a human's.
2. Successful alternatives include test tube studies on human tissue cultures, statistics and computer models.
3. The stress that animals endure in labs can affect experiments, making the results meaningless.
4. Animals are still used to test items like cleaning products, which benefit mankind less than medicines or surgery.