Besides laboratory costs, consider the costs of caring for herds of animals. Sophisticated surveillance procedures to guard against the transmission of infectious diseases would be a necessity, especially in xenotransplantation. Using limited research dollars on these types of experiments when these same dollars can be used more appropriately for better methods of treatment and prevention seem inappropriate. Costly research and medical procedures tend to benefit a limited, chosen group while health care costs rise, insurance coverages become more limited, and insurance premiums increase. The result is that more and more people, not the chosen, will not find adequate health care services available to them.
Xenotransplantation poses perhaps the greatest risk of exposing human populations to a lethal virus.
The new strains of swine flu that periodically appear may become more pronounced if pigs are used as organ donors for humans. Dr. Robin Weiss of the Chester Beatty Laboratory in London announced the discovery of PERV, or pig endogenous retrovirus. PERV is capable of infecting human cells although it is unclear what disease it may cause in humans. Trying to identify potentially lethal viruses that might be transmitted to humans during a xenotransplant would be nearly impossible. Cloning transgenic animals to produce pharmaceutical proteins is a dangerous procedure.