Letter Library | Fact Sheets | Store | Donate | About Kinship Circle | Email List | Updates | Digest
Animal Rights Ads | Columns & Articles | Disaster Victims | Stanley | Links | Mission | Home
|
|
Must Mascara And Soap Hurt This Much? by Brenda Shoss Imagine you are strapped to a table. Your gut instinct is to trust the people around you. You are in their care. But your body begins to burn. Behind you, muddled words escalate with the same fury as the scalded skin you cannot reach. You are afraid. They seem indifferent to your now blood-splattered limbs. That morning, you'd dreamed about a walk and food. But today you are their research. Their data is your response-pain, boundless and unrelenting. As they blind, burn and inject poison into your exhausted body, you wonder: why? Imagine you are an animal in a laboratory. The Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act does not require animal tests to ensure the safety of cosmetics. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) doesn't specify animal research for soap, detergents and other personal care items. Yet every year, millions of rabbits, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, ferrets, primates, rats and mice undergo gruesome tests. In the Draize test chemicals are poured into the clipped-open eyes of restrained animals. Many break their necks or backs trying to escape. Reactions include swollen eyelids, inflamed irises bleeding, massive deterioration and blindness. For Draize skin irritancy tests, abrasive chemicals seep into the shaved skin of immobilized animals. To expose skin, adhesive tape is repeatedly stripped off an animal's body. After every test animals are killed and analyzed. The Lethal Dose 50 Percent (LD-50) measures the volume of substance it takes to kill half of a test group of live animals. In studies that last up to 2 years, animals ingest chemicals through stomach tubes, inhalation, sprays and injections. They suffer vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions, paralysis and bleeding from the eyes, nose and mouth. Surviving animals are destroyed. These tests aren't mandatory, but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and CPSC do ask manufacturers to pursue all means necessary to verify product safety. Since regulatory guidelines typically don't mention non-animal options, many companies follow the implied animal-test policies of supervisory agencies and industry legal departments. The FDA stipulates animal tests for drugs, including items that modify bodily functions such as sunscreens, antiperspirants, anti-dandruff shampoos or acne medicine. Yet science takes a back-door approach when it utilizes animals to mimic the human reaction to drugs, chemicals or injury. According to Science Journal (1999) the way a drug interacts with various tissues and liver enzymes deviates significantly between species. Small animals excrete drugs faster than humans. By the time a drug exits a mouse, it doesn't correspond to the human version. Over a 9-year period, 198 of 209 animal-tested drugs were relabeled or withdrawn because they led to hospitalization, disability or death. The FDA recently recalled drugs with Phenylpropanolamine-Alka-Seltzer cold remedies, Comtrex, Dimetapp, Robitussin, etc.-due to their link with hemorrhagic stroke in women. The hepatitis drug fialuridine represents still another animal-to-human blunder. Fialuridine proved safe in dog tests. It caused liver failure in 7 out of 15 humans. Dogs possess an enzyme that inactivates the drug's lethal effect. Humans don't have that enzyme. Animal test results cannot reliably estimate allergic effects in humans. Until rabbits wear mascara and dogs use fabric softener, this flawed methodology will offer little more than speculation and comparison. The Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) and the National Toxicology Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM) now develop and validate non-animal tests. President Clinton signed the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM) Authorization Act to install an official body to accredit non-animal modes. With ICCVAM-approved Corrositex Assay (artificial skin to test a chemical's burn potential) companies can discard cruel Draize skin tests.
About Kinship Circle | Mission | Donate | Kinship Circle Store | Animal Rights Ad Designs
|