Press release 9_11_10

 EQUIVITA PRESS RELEASE
9/11/10

Vivisection and science: two diverging roads

The enforcement of the new Directive 2010/63 on animal testing (with a two-year transposition period) officially confirms the rejection, by the EU, of a scientific update, which is not only necessary, but crucial for the safeguard of human health and the environment, and its intention to relaunch an erroneous, misleading research method.

 
The experimentation on “animal models” has always been proven unreliable and deceptive for the purposes of biomedic research. In recent years, this evidence has become official on scientific bodies of maximum importance and credibility.

An “epochal turning point” in toxicological research has been announced, for example, by the National Research Council of the U.S.A., which, comparing it to historical events like "the discovery of DNA and the creation of the first computer”, has described it as a “shift from a system based on the study of animals to a system based on in vitro methods, which are now able to evaluate the way a substance alters gene function inside human cells”.

Everybody (except for the majority of the European regulators, or so it seems) knows that:
Every living species can only be a model of itself. This is shown by poisons, like strychnine and hemlock, to mention only 2 out of 1000, which are excellent food for various laboratory animals; this is also shown by the fact that, out of 100 substances which pass animal testing, 92 of them fail clinical trials on man.

Animal testing is still relaunched today, in 2010, since Europe is subject to the lobbies of chemical substance manufacturers and wants to allow them to reach the best business results through the selection of the most suitable animal species, besides avoiding any civil responsibility in case of environmental or pharmacological disasters (in order to say, a posteriori, “we all know that an animal test is not a reliable test…”).

 
The extraordinary recent technologies (due to new achievements in the fields of science, genetics, biology, chemistry, computer science, etc.), which are 10,000 times faster and 1,000 times more cost-effective and, as the final report of the “VII World Congress on Alternative Methods and Animal Testing” (Rome, 2009) states: “generate a wealth of knowledge which has never been reached or discovered before”, permit the achievement of an immediate safeguard for our health and the environment; however, these primary values are unfortunately set aside for profit.

 
Moreover, the new technologies follow the common feeling of European citizens, who cannot stand any longer the terrible sufferings of tenths and hundreds of millions of animals sacrificed on the altar of a false science (this remark goes alongside with the previous one, since the ethical aspect is not secondary to the scientific one).

The EQUIVITA Scientific Commission and the great majority of European citizens, who have already expressed themselves on all possible occasions (for example, in the demonstrations of 25th September in Rome and 6th November near Brescia), under the coordination of some (few, and therefore praiseworthy) European members of Parliament, will not give up fighting against vivisection and, when the new regulation for the application of Art. 11 of EU Treaty is ready, they will organize a petition to promote a popular initiative for a bill which could make EU regain a minimum degree of dignity and consent.

 
EQUIVITA Scientific Commission

Tel. + 39. 06.3220720, + 39. 335.8444949
Email:[email protected]
Internet:www.equivita.org

(Translated from Italian by Giuliana Mafrica – Translators against vivisection)

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