Good to see that the crack troops at SAS (Sense About Science) have included misguided mumbo jumbo about microdosing in their celebrity slag-off today. Apparently TV actress Jenny Seagrove (of Waitrose ads and Judge John Deed fame) said that microdosing could replace ‘animals and primates’ (so primates are not animals?) in research. Pharmacologist Professor Nancy Rothwell, Vice President for Research at Manchester University and chair of RDS, countered:

The mistake is understandable Jenny, but microdosing is a technique for measuring how small doses of drugs move around the body. It has not yet been properly validated, but in the future it may replace some animal tests. Unfortunately, if we want new medicines for diseases like cancer or cystic fibrosis, there are some cases where there are no alternatives to using animals.

Also animal-rights-inspired was Heather Mills McCartney’s feeble attempt to link milk drinking and obesity. See more nonsense from the celebs, and sense from the scientists, in a leaflet on the SAS website and some excellent reporting by The Guardian and the BBC. The Sun got in the act, too, with Profs Rap Dim Star Comments. Mental images of Professors rapping about astronomy. Hmmm.

Interesting feature on the animal experimentation debate in last week’s science journal Nature. Amongst other things, they did an anonymous international online poll of nearly 1700 biomedical researchers. About half of them used animals in their research.

When asked to rate how necessary animal research was for progressing biomedical science on a scale of 1 (not at all necessary) to 4 (essential), three quarters of all respondents, including those who did not work with animals themselves, said it was essential. About a fifth rated it as 3, and only a tiny minority (about 1%) thought it unnecessary. So much for antivivisection claims that lots of scientists oppose animal research.

Nature commented that: 

The Guardian today published a short news item Many animal tests are badly flawed, say scientists. This news item was based on a paper in this week’s British Medical Journal, and the subject of a BMJ press release.

I thought it looked very familiar. I checked, and it seems this is research published as a report on the University of Birmingham website six months ago. I thought its conclusions were a bit dodgy then and I blogged it here.

This is just the same research redrafted for the BMJ. If at first you don’t succeed in getting publicity, just redraft your paper and get it published in a different place. If you’re lucky you might then get the national newspapers interested in a story based on an exaggeration that is six months old anyway.

Rather than bury this as a comment on an old blog entry I thought I’d follow their example and do a new one to put it right at the top.

There can be few areas of scientific research which have been subject to so much public debate and scrutiny, as well as detailed scientific investigation, as the use of animals in research.

Today we see the publication of yet another in-depth enquiry - the report of the Weatherall Committee into The Use of Non-Human Primates in Research. Like all the other enquiries before it, this one concludes that there is a strong scientific case for the carefully regulated use of animals in research - in this case non-human primates.

Will the animal rights groups take any notice of this report? We barely need to ask the question. They will never accept the results of any enquiry unless it gives them the answer they want (ie total abolition of animal research) - and that is unlikely for the foreseeable future.

The BBC 10 o’clock news on 7th December showed how media coverage of the issue of the use of animals in research has moved on. A report on the Northwick Park drug trial was followed by a report on the conviction of an animal rights bomber

First of all what about the drug trial? The official report focused on what it should; learning from problems and the impact on the volunteer who was affected.  We certainly should learn from this episode, just because things go right most of the time does not mean we cannot learn and change. However animal testing abolitionist groups continue to say that the animal tests failed, this shows a general failure, and all animal testing should be stopped. An example from the BUAV:

There have been several fantastic science/medicine stories in the last few days that have fulfilled all the ‘top trump’ criteria you might expect (1) if there were a Science or Biomedical Research pack. All revealed progress in stem-cell-based treatment. The Guardian clearly appreciated the good science too. 

Sadly, the first about mini-livers, see Zebedee’s Mini-livers - hope or hype?, was an example of how poor reporting on scientific issues can lead to unwarranted hype (and/or misleading antiviv spin) surrounding an important medical breakthrough.

However, the reporting of three others has been accurate and excellent:

US antivivisectionist Ray Greek has been rather quiet for a while.

A while back this ‘top science adviser’ said:

‘Melanoma is a lethal cancer in humans but is usually not so in dogs’

A vaccine for melanoma in humans is now being trialled and also at the same time been found successful in dogs, and this recent news story also states:

‘Dogs, like humans, can naturally get many forms of cancer, including melanoma. In dogs, the melanoma is not usually related to sun exposure, but it can be very difficult to treat, and it’s often fatal.’

So is Greek just being quiet, or has the media realised that he talks rubbish?

There was a great story all over the media yesterday about scientists growing liver tissue from stem cells. I suppose what caught my attention was that The Scotsman and several other newspapers said that this meant mini artificial livers could replace animal and human medicines testing.

Well, one day they might replace the small amount of testing carried out for liver toxicity, but they would tell us nothing about potential toxicity to the immune system, to the nervous system, to the fetus, or about the potential to cause cancer. And they would be of little use in research into Alzheimer’s disease, HIV, bird flu, cystic fibrosis and other diseases in need of prevention, treatment or cure.

Shame this interesting advance got hyped out of all proportion and scientists got misquoted. I asked one of them what he had actually said, and he commented:

I do think that new techniques may reduce animal testing, and replace certain elements of it, but I don’t say that animal testing is gone forever. It is still an important element of the work that we do. I do believe in Reduce, Replace and Refine, but I am also realistic.

Certainly puts it in context. This is still a great example of the steady work scientists are doing towards reducing the numbers of animals used in research and testing by developing potential replacement alternatives. 

I just picked up a nice story on blood transfusion, from the BBC kids’ programme Newsround, of all places (well, they did a good piece on mice in glue ear research last week).

Apparently a new animal donor register has just been set up. The story of how it came into being is on the register’s website:

This week’s In the Know magazine (October 10, pages 18-19) has an article about animal research featuring an articulate, intelligent trainee barrister who happens to be diabetic. Lisa says:

Before insulin was discovered, diabetes would be a death sentence. I wouldn’t be here today if scientists hadn’t tested on animals. I know it’s not ideal but it’s the only way forward in many cases. I’d always put the life of a human above an animal.’

I think most people would agree. This presents a dilemma for antivivisection and animal rights groups. They cannot deny that the most people – vegans aside – do not accord animals the same rights as humans. So they either deny the evidence of history – eg the key role of Banting, Best and a dog called Marjorie in the discovery and development of insulin – or claim that animals are no longer necessary in medical research.

The In The Know article outlines the story of insulin and other animal-research-dependent medical advances. So what case does the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection make against animal research in this article? They resort to a string of distortions and blatant lies. Here’s the worst example:

‘… only about 20% of experiments are for medical purposes. Others are for products such as household cleaners, fertilisers and petrol.’

Petrol??? I don’t know where they got that one from.

The animal experimentation figures are publicly available, if a little complex (that’s why we provide an accessible summary on the RDS website). But using some simple arithmetic, it’s clear that the safety testing of household products and agricultural chemicals together added up to just 1.2% of all animal experiments in 2005.

Tests on non-medical products are a very small percentage of animal use. In fact 96% of all the animal procedures in 2005 were used for some form of biomedical research – basic and applied research, medicines development, and testing of new medical and veterinary products.

The incoming director of BUAV, if she is at all concerned about the truth, has a big clean-up job to do.

In a letter published by The Observer on Sunday, antivivisectionist Richard Mountford of Animal Aid (for some reason he doesn’t mention his affiliation) tries to align pro-life and antivivisection campaigning:

It is absurd for so-called right-to-life campaigners to object to medical research on cells from dead human embryos, when they do not object to research on live animals (’Scientists turn dead cells into live tissue’, News, last week). They may feel squeamish about using human cells, but that is not a moral argument.
Richard Mountford, letter in The Observer, 1 October 2006

So far so good. But then he states that: ‘thousands of animals suffer in experiments every day in British laboratories’ and says we should invest in stem cell research and ‘stop using cruel animal tests’. Most scientists agree that suffering should be minimised, and I do not believe that animal tests can be characterised as cruel.

But the main point is that stem cell research and stem cell therapies depend very much on animal research, particularly research involving mice. And arguably we would not have progressed very far in this field if it weren’t for Dolly the sheep. Animal Aid seems to inhabit a fact-free zone.

For more evidence on the importance of animals in this research, look no further than the RDS web page Stem cell therapies and mouse research. 

There have been many reports that a virulent strain of the ‘superbug’ C difficile has killed 49 people in Leicester hospitals this year.

This is relevant to the well-worn antivivisection mantra ‘pencillin is a useful antibiotic for people but kills guinea pigs’. Partially true, but the devil is in the detail which they don’t tell you.

In fact, early studies showed that ‘good’ bacteria normally present in the guinea-pig intestine are sensitive to penicillin. So, after penicillin, all these bacteria disappear and are replaced by greater numbers of some types of ‘bad’ bacteria – eg Clostridium difficile. This can lead to absorption of toxins and may cause death from blood poisoning. It seems that guinea pigs, far from being strikingly different from humans, are in fact very similar and provided a clear warning that penicillin could cause colitis or worse in vulnerable patients on long-term penicillin.  More information on the RDS website.

When I first saw the story in The Sun ‘Rabbit flu was revenge’ I thought it must be a sick joke. For a start, I’d heard of bird flu but not rabbit flu. But I checked and found the sad news on BBC Online that a young farmer had indeed died from so-called rabbit flu (caused by a bacterium called Pasteurella multocida) earlier this month. The sick twist to this story is that, according to today’s Sun report, animal rights extremists have been tormenting the young man’s distressed parents with phone calls telling them his death was ‘the rabbit’s revenge’ (they claimed he’d been culling rabbits). How low can they go?

The disease, also known as pasteurellosis, is apparently common in cats and dogs, but it is quite uncommon for it to pass to humans (about 400 cases a year recorded in the UK). According to the Health Protection Agency it is treatable with antibiotics and fatalities are extremely rare. In this case it developed into a fatal septicaemia. I assume the young farmer, John Freeman, did not get the antibiotics that would have saved him, or was treated too late. Ironic really, considering that all antibiotics, from streptomycin and penicillin onwards, have been developed and tested using animals.

It’s quaintly predictable that the rent-a-quotes at PETA should try to make a story out of an artistic display where a naked woman cuddles a pig!

Yes it is true, remember it is the silly season and PETA combines a lack of a sense of humour and perspective with the arrogance of assumed expertise in mental health:

This seems to be a desperate cry for help that merits visits from mental health counsellors, not voyeurs

The funny part is the field day for headline writers: Sun (Pig sick over dead porker), Mirror (ART..OR PIG SICK). The Mail predictably focused on how it was funded by taxpayers, and the US Media swallowed the PETA line.

However dig deeper, and it is apparent that this story is an own goal for PETA. It is actually a story about replacement alternatives to animals - I kid you not!

The artists funding for this project came from the Wellcome Trust SciArt initiative. working on tissue culture of human cells. You can see more details, and an even a video here.

But we always knew publicity was PETA’s objective, not real progress in animal welfare.

I was sad to learn of the death of Professor William ‘Bill’ Russell three weeks ago. He was co-inventor with the late Rex Burch of the Three Rs - Reduction, Refinement, Replacement - the guiding principles of animal research today. I hardly knew him, but I do remember him bursting into song while giving talks to large and distinguished audiences. He was clearly a polymath and a fascinating man.

The three Rs are a lasting legacy, with many welfare awards and even a building in the names of Russell and Burch, and of course there is now a National Centre for the Three Rs.

There’s a delightful obituary of this delightful man in The Guardian today by Caroline Richmond. She sums up the ‘musical polymath and promoter of laboratory animal welfare’ thus:

a funny and erudite polymath who wrote science fiction novels, introduced the concept of replacement, refinement and reduction - the 3Rs - into animal research, and had successful careers as a psychoanalyst, zoologist, agronomist and sociologist. His wide ranging knowledge and capacity to set almost anything he was going to say to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune made him immensely popular and earned him a place on BBC Radio’s Round Britain Quiz for several years.

I realised reading his obituary just how much I didn’t know about Bill Russell.