From ABC Health and Wellbeing, 19 August 2016:
There’s an uncomfortable truth to modern medicine.
That drug you take for your high blood pressure, the vaccine to prevent infectious disease, the pill to avoid pregnancy, the medical ointment for your skin condition, or even the pacemaker keeping your arrhythmia in check — all of those and more have, at one time, been tested on a live animal.
Between the testing of a new chemical compound on cell cultures in a laboratory and the first time that compound is given to a live human, it will almost certainly be administered to mice, rats, rabbits and perhaps even a non-human primate.
These animals could be said to be the unsung heroes of modern medicine — although they aren’t volunteers.
In recent years there has been an increasing focus on problems of using animals in medical research, and what — if any — alternatives exist or could be developed to replace them. Read more.
Bianca Nogrady 