Savlon poisoned by animal rights activists....

[hecciesmum]

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/30/nsavlon130.xml

ffs....these people. Putting bleach in contact lens solution??!! SO, it's Ok to maim innocent people using a product that the have nothing to do woith the manufacture of, but not to hurt a hamster in the name of medical science?

I know this is very controversial, and I think that unnecessary testing on animals for cosmetics etc should all be banned, but woud I rather a hamster died in order to create a treatment, than my child died because there was no cure??

[ducks below parapet and waits to get shot at]

How about baboons? Are baboons ever used in experiments? I think they'd make excellent candidates, being an utterly vile example of primate. I mean, have you seen how they act? They're cretins.

Get rid and at least let some good come of it.

"I use a lot of asda products " - I'm sorry - but if it is a medicine then it will have been tested in animals. It cannot be gievn to a human without it.

KerryMum.....I am sorry - but I cannot see a point in my lifetime where there is going to be a valid alternative to the safety tests which are carried out in animals - that does not involve animals.

Baboons aren't apes. Neither are monkey.

Come to think of it, I hate chimps, too.

Gorillas are pretty cool, though.

The drug trials went wrong BECAUSE the drugs acted differently in humans to the way they had in primates, IIRC. The drug company had been lulled into a false sense of security. Can't immediately recall the details but wasn't it a novel agent with a novel action or something, i.e. an entirely new type of drug that acts in a whole different way to any existing medicines?

People who put bleach in contact lens solution are just nutters. But I do get fed up when animal rights protestors are tarred with the terrorist brush. E.g. the BBC running scare of a proposed plot line on Casualty with an Islamist bomber and changing the baddie to an animal rights protestor. Since when were animal rights protestors bombing anyone?

"There ARE meds that make it through animal trials and then catastrophe on human trials.

Happens more than you think"

I agree - but how much more often would it happen and how much more severe would the consequences be if at least some of the questions hadn't been answered and solutions found by use of animals first?

If you are referring to the my name........it is about protecting my identity from the millions of people that use the internet and are able to read these messages...coupled with other info that I have previously posted on teh boards.

The fighting dogs on tonights panarama are pitbulls who are often sold as Irish staffs or American staffs/bulldogs.
You will see these dogs being advertised on gumtree pets on a daily basis.
FFS when are there gonna be tougher measures to stop these thugs making a 'quick buck?'

KerryMum Is PETRA a truely accurate source of information?

I have never worked with animals. I prefer computers. I think that computational modelling and tissue cultures can certainly reduce the need for animal experimentation. I don't think that computational modelling or tissue cultures will ever be good enough to remove the need for some animal experimentation. Or at least not in our life time.

What needs to be asked is whether a proposed animal experiment is justified.

Indeed if you expect a drug to act on teh lungs you can't expect tissue culture or a computational model to predict unpredictable side effects in the heart. tissue culture and computational models may go some way towards modelling what you expect to happen in the target organ but as Reallytired (an I below) have said they are not going to be sofisticated enough to model unanticipated effects within our lifetime - if ever.

And believe me I have seen examples where a drug which is supposed to work in one way on the lungs for eg. has shocked everyone working on it with unexpected safety problems on the heart.

Tomorrow, my highly qualified, underpaid, overworked scientist husband who works in medical research to benefit others will go to work knowing that he will spend the afternoon trying to keep away from the windows because of animal protesters who are trying to take his photo and scare and intimidate him. He will have to park his car elsewhere so that they don't take down his number plate or try and follow him. When he gets back to the car he will check underneath for bombs and keep his fingers crossed that he is not followed home where his innocent children are. I will wait here hoping he comes back safely.

Bastards.

Kerrymum, you are right that some drugs still have problems in people but do you know that 9/10 drugs in trial fail to ever get to humans because of the problemsthat are detected in the animal trial stage?

And plese don't trot out the old lie that if penicillin had been tested on guinipigs it would never have got to us. This is horse shit.

My dh is dying of incurable cance. He is worth a damn sight more than rats and mice.

Are you aware that more unwanted pet dogs are put down my the RSPCA than are used in reserch.

I have been in a 'animal testing' facility for medical research as a friend worked there and I went to meet her.
It was cleaner and the animals (rats, euch!) were better cared for than my own pets. The cages were cleaned out everyday, they were kept in great condition, had loads of toys in huge cages where they were kept in groups and raised, from birth, to be healthy. There was a vet permanently on staff to make sure they were healthy and not in pain.
They were testing long term effects of certain drugs which just can't be done on humans as you would have to wait for an entire human life span to see the effects and when they were put down it was done humanely with an injection so no suffering.

Back to the article though, wtf is this abour
'The group, calling itself the Animal Rights Militia, said it targeted Savlon in a "clear and uncompromising" manner because it believes its Swiss manufacturer, Novartis, to be a client of the research centre Huntingdon Life Sciences*.'
So they aren't even sure, and Novartis don't test on animals themselves but are possibly loosely affiliated with someone who does?

chirpygirl - I seem to remember they (animal rights activists) targeted - or threatened to target - the Royal bank of Scotland, because of some connection, even ordinary customers who had accounts there.

I vaguely remember something like that saltire, it's like the poor builders in Oxford who were just doing their job and got targeted.

It pisses me off that they target people who are so vaguely connected to possible animal testing, just so they can get the publicity.
Not a good way to gain public sympathy imo.

PETA are a bunch of terrorists - any organisation that is prepared to put human lives at risk to further their own ends is. Furthermore, in the US, they are manipulating draft legislation that in a round about way would make it impossible for people to keep pets. Is that what people want?

The solution is simple!

Just do all experiments on monkeys.

Better still if the definition of 'monkeys' includes nasty criminally minded people who hurt others to make their point.

I think that experimenting on criminals would make us as bad as the Nazis. Virtually no useful data was obtained by the Nazis with their experiments anyway.

Monkeys = Military Police. Seems perfectly reasonable to experiment on them if you ask me

Oh how stupid. Even their extremist rationale breaks down if they can think of doing something that might harm children - who do not buy the products or have any choice about what adults use to treat their cuts and scratches. Nasty and evil.

I do agree with you about monkeys etc. expat, they freak me out. I work in information publishing and sometimes have had to write about monkeys and sift through pictures of them which would leave me squirming. A collegaue used to refer to it as my "primate problem"

They send shivers down my spine, snow. I find them far more alarming than clowns.
I would not want to have to see pictures of them. I don't even like to see them on nature shows. If the show's about monkeys - or baboons, which I find even more deplorable - I turn it off.

Hey reallyTired, I do computer modelling stuff too. And agree 100% with what you say.

As to the illogical tactics:
My dh knew someone who got branded as a paedophile because he worked for a UK company (which made no products needing animal testing) which was aquired by a foreign company which did need to do some. Huh?