Household Product Testing – Useless?
Three months ago, we took note of a 10-year study finding that billions of dollars of research and billions of lives of mice have gone down the drain in experiments on mice that have proved completely useless when applied to humans.
Now a follow-up report says that any number of household, food and cosmetic products that have been tested on mice and other animals may not be as safe as we have been assured. According to Independent Science News:
New scientific research has cast grave doubt on the safety testing of hundreds of thousands of consumer products, food additives and industrial chemicals.
The safety of all these products – household cleansers, baby foods, gardening products, paints, shampoos and many more – should all now be held suspect, loaded as they are with synthetic chemicals and poisons.
Official assurances of the safety of these chemicals are based largely on animal experiments that use rabbits, mice, rats and dogs. But new results from a consortium of researchers and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest such assurances may be worthless.
The study we reported in February took direct aim at the belief that what works on, for example, mice, rabbits and dogs must work on humans. After analyzing ten years of research, the study concluded that out of nearly 150 drugs that had passed extensive (and expensive) mouse trials, nearly every single one failed in humans. It also raised major questions about the use of mice in researching almost any disease that involves the immune system, including cancer and heart disease.
Perhaps these results should not be a surprise. Concordance has been questioned by numerous researchers, some of whom have noted that mice are separated from humans by 120 million years of evolutionary change (Stoloff 1992; Greek and Swingle Greek, 2003; Mestas and Hughes, 2004; Knight, 2007). And, unlike humans, mice also suffer from different diseases, lack a gall bladder, have no menstrual cycle, have multiple births, differ in immune systems, lifespan and size, to name only a few dissimilarities.
The false results produced in the household product tests may be even more harmful to more people than the tests on medical products. That’s because virtually 100 percent of us are being subjected to a whole array of these products every day, while fewer of us are being subjected to new-fangled medical products.
But the vivisection belief system is held in place by a huge multi-billion dollar industry that supports research grants, laboratory equipment, breeding factories that churn out billions of animals with made-to-order genetic deficiencies and enhancements. According to the Associated Press:
A mouse with arthritis runs close to $200; two pairs of epileptic mice can cost 10 times that. You want three blind mice? That’ll run you about $250. And for your own custom mouse, with the genetic modification of your choosing, expect to pay as much as $100,000.
… Depending on the specific genetic manipulation, the cost to create a custom mouse is usually in the tens of thousands of dollars. Once the line has been established, individual animals can run into the hundreds.
… The Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit supplier [of mice] in Bar Harbor, Maine, ships more than 2 million a year. Commercial breeder Charles River Laboratories of Wilmington, Mass., makes about $500 million annually selling and caring for lab animals, most of them mice.
… As many as 25 million mice are now used in experiments each year.
While these reports and studies are devastating in terms of the facts they reveal, don’t expect any big changes. The vivisection industry is every bit as powerful and corrupt as all the other major lobbying groups. And when profits are on the line, the millions of innocent animals sacrificed to this giant industry are nothing more than collateral damage.