
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 24, 1990                   TAG: 9004240496
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

A DAY TO OBSERVE ANIMALS' RIGHTS

APRIL 24, World Day for Laboratory Animals, is a day when followers of our great moral teacher of animals' rights - St. Francis, Gandhi, Lincoln, Martin Luther King - protest animal research. Throughout history, cruel scientific experiments were perpetrated on minorities, prisoners of war and animals, while unconscionable scientists rationalized their actions.

Aside from moral considerations, biomedical research is costly and counterproductive. Crude animal tests cannot be extrapolated to humans, as proven when drugs such as thalidomide, swine-flu vaccine, etc., proved safe when tested on animals but tragic and fatal on humans.

Vaccines were less important in curing major infectious diseases such as polio, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria and typhoid than improved living conditions and sanitation. Perhaps most frighteningly, we are learning that old monkey-virus vaccines may be responsible for multiple sclerosis and sudden infant death syndrome.

Seven billion dollars of federal support of animal research is spent annually - almost $2 million every hour of every day just in the United States. The National Institutes of Health support 75 percent of biomedical research; approximately $3 billion went for research on mammals as subjects. Three animals are killed every second in laboratories in the United States, probably twice that number worldwide!

Humanity is in grave danger because it places confidence in scientists who consider themselves above moral and spiritual values: researchers who earn approximately 70 percent of the bloody grant research money in salaries.

LEE KAYALOFF\ ROANOKE

by CNB