A recent BBC news article on the rise in animal use in UK labs contained the following statement from a pro-vivisection spokesperson. "Animal testing for medical research is unavoidable."

The person who said this needs an English lesson. Animal testing is no more "unavoidable" (or "essential" as I’ve also heard it called) than is eating chocolate. We do it by choice, and we need only the will to stop doing it. I will admit to one crucial difference between animal testing and chocolate: chocolate is less hazardous to your health.

The horrific incident of March 2006, when those six poor British blokes’ lives were irrevocably changed by the TGN1412 drug trial, was merely one of the more celebrated examples of how animal data can lead us astray. The blockbuster arthritis drug Vioxx was withdrawn in 2004 after it was found that patients taking it have a 50 percent greater chance of heart attacks and sudden cardiac death. There are many, many other examples like this. More than 90% of drugs tested safe in animals fail to be safe for humans.

Safety tests using human cells are more accurate than animal tests. In the Multicenter Evaluation of In Vitro Cytotoxicity tests (MEIC), researchers evaluated 68 different methods to predict the toxicity of 50 different chemicals. Rat LD50 tests—lethal dose tests still used—were only 59 percent accurate, but a combined human cell test was 83 percent accurate in predicting actual human toxicity.

With data like this, one may conclude that animal testing is driven by profit, ignorance, and inertia. Unavoidably so.