Animal testing

Animal testing is rather important for medical breakthroughs, and is indeed, very necessary for creating new and better drugs. Human's have been testing on animals for thousands of years, this practice has helped us to make and test a multitude of averagely used items, ranging from everyday products such as lipstick, cleaning supplies, band-aids, etc to antibiotics, vaccines, and antiviral medicines. There a many reasons to use animals in testing, catergories of this include, availabilty, cost, logistics, and the overall benefits. In these catergories, there are also reasons why animal testing may be the only option. For your first argument you state that there is "obviously" a recent increase in animal testing, this is hardly true. You state that there is a 7% increase between 2015 and 2016, which is an incredibly insignificant amount. Next you argue that some drugs declared safe (Orpen) are wrongly tested and killed or caused illness among over 3,500 people. While this was a tragedy, these few instances are but setbacks considering the the amount of lives saved from medicines tested by animals. The epidemic of polio, killed thousands of people, with the help of animal testing, immunizations were made to save thousands more. Nearly 50 million Americans with high blood pressure have lower incidences of heart attack due to drugs developed with the aid of animal testing. also mention the problem of compatibility between the animals and humans, which connects to the cases of failed trials in drugs. But, 95% of all tested animals are rats and mice, which, next to monkeys, are the most compatible with the human body. (ProCon.org) One of the more prominent arguments for animal testing is availability of test subjects. Yes, if we were to test on humans, the results would obviously be much better, and research would be better guided. But you must factor in the supply, not many people are going to willingly undergo the experiments we put animals through. An estimated 26 million animals are used for testing in the united states(ProCon.org) there are definitely not 26 million people, maybe even in the entire world that would willingly undergo these experiments. Also considering that rats and mice have a life-span of 2-3 years, and can be reproduced much easier and faster than human's can for obvious reasons. Even if there were people who chose to undergo these experiments, there would still be problems. People are very different genetically, and as we know, in science, we need identical test subjects for validity. We don't want all of these different circumstances to impact our results. Which leads to the answer, we have much more control of rats than we ever could on humans. We have what are called "transgenic" rats, where we replicate the genes that cause illness among humans so that our results can be as valid as possible.(Livescience.org) Lastly, other methods for testing drugs and products tend to be more expensive. For example, one common idea that comes to mind when thinking of alternatives is Vitro testing, which involves growing and testing from petri dishes. But it costs $2-$10 million according to the Food and Drug Administration. While alternative methods such as computer simulations, and cloning are obviously much more expensive. For the reason of availability, Testing drugs on animals is a much better option considering there are no other reliable subjects of testing.