Several years ago, before I had much of an interest in animal rights, I happened to attend a speech by the Humane Society of the United States’ Howard Lyman where he gave his ridiculous spiel about Mad Cow disease. I don’t remember the exact quote, but Lyman went on about how Mad Cow disease might turn into a human epidemic that would vastly outstrip HIV as an epidemic.

    In fact the latest available statistics reveal what many skeptics long suspected — so far there is absolutely no evidence of any epidemic of the human analogue to Mad Cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

    In fact given all the hoopla over Mad Cow disease in the media, it is suprising to see just how few people die from CJD. In Great Britain, which had a massive outbreak of mad cow in that nation’s cattle during the 1980s, an average of 12 people a year die from CJD. Even assuming that every single case of CJD was caused by eating beef (and there is yet no convincing evidence to finally establish the CJD/Mad Cow link), that would make eating beef from Great Britain far safer than walking up or down stairs or entering the bathtub. More children die in playground accidents in the United States every year than die of CJD in Great Britain.

    This level of risk is what drove Oprah Winfrey to claim she’d never eat another hamburger? Talk about a tempest in a teapot.

Source:

Report: Incidence of human form of mad cow disease settles down. The Associated Press, June 16, 2000.

    It isn’t much of an exaggeration to trace the beginning of an effective animal rights movement in the United States to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ investigation of Edward Taub in 1981 which made national headlines for the fledgling group.

    Taub was a researcher at the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Springs, Maryland, in 1981 doing experiments with monkeys designed to better understand the mechanism of paralysis. Taub hired a young lab assistant named Alex Pacheco. Pacheco, of course, was a PETA plant. Pacheco waited until Taub was away from his lab for an extended period to call in authorities to raid the lab.

    Taub’s supporters argued that Pacheco intentionally neglected the animals to make Taub look bad during his absence, while photographs that PETA took of the monkeys in restraining apparatuses are probably the most widely circulated animal rights photographs ever taken.

    At his first trial on animal cruelty charges, Taub was convicted on six chages, but an appeal brought a new trial which resulted in an acquittal on all but one of the charges. That sole conviction, too, was later overturned on appeal.

    Putting aside the debate over how well Taub took care of his monkeys, according to PETA the sort of research Taub was doing is useless. The only reason anyone would ever do those sort of experiments on monkeys would be to keep overpaid research scientists in business if you believe PETA’s cant.

    Last week, however, it was announced that Taub’s research at Silver Springs combined with subsequent research on primates has led to the development of a new treatemtn for people affected by stroke-induced paralysis, which afflicts an estimated 4 million people. The whole point of Taub’s original research was to discover if monkeys suffering from nerve damage could re-learn how to use their limbs. Taub’s research demonstrated that, in fact, they could be re-trained to use their limbs and the result of that research is now finding its way into treatment of human beings — albeit delayed for years thanks to PETA’s actions.

    As Taub himself put it in a 1990 letter,

The actions of the antivivisectionists have resulted in withholding the potential benefits of this treatment to a large number of humans whose quality of life has been greatly compromised by their stroke.

    If PETA and the animal rights movement had its way, these new techniques wouldn’t just be delayed; they’d never see the light of day at all.

Source:

Monkeys First. Debra J. Saunders. The San Francisco Chronicle, June 25, 2000.

Edward Taub’s web site: http://www.uab.edu/neurotp/textonly/taub.html

    Football’s Green Bay Packers are in the middle of obtaining new financing for renovating and expanding Lambeau Field where they play, and one the possibilities that has come up is selling the right to name the renovated field.

    People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals weighed in recently suggesting the team needs to drop the Packers moniker as well since it promotes violence against animals. The name is a reference to meat packers and was adopted as the team name in 1919.

    According to PETA activist Bruce Friedrich, the team could be renamed the “Pickers” to allude to picking fruit and crops. Forgetting the controversy PETA got involved in over its “Drink Beer” campaign, they also suggest renaming the team the Green Bay “Six-Packers” in reference to Wisconsin’s brewing industry.

    Since PETA solicits millions in donations and spends almost all of it on stupid publicity stunts rather than anything to improve animal welfare, why doesn’t Ingrid Newkirk offer the Packers a few million dollars to change the name? That wouldn’t be any bigger waste of money than other ridiculous things PETA gets involved with.

Source:

Packers Will Stick With Name. The Associated Press, June 26, 2000.

    The Environmental Protection Agency’s radical environmental agenda is ironically pushing into to a position that is both contrary to science and to the animal welfare position.

    The animal welfare positions holds that while animal experiments have played a crucial role in our increasing medical knowledge, wherever possible researchers should reduce the number of animals they use or replace them altogether with alternatives, provided reducing or replacing animals provides data as robust and accurate as traditional methods.

    In a bizarre twist, the EPA is currently arguing, however, that safety data produced from human clinical trials should be reject in favor of safety data derived from animals. Why? Because the human safety data doesn’t appear to give EPA the environmentally correct answers it wants.

    The first volley in this fight is the insecticide chlorpyrifos, sold over the counter as Dursban. Dursban is a highly effective insecticide that appears to be very safe. Dursban’s manufacturer conducted safety trials of the insecticide where human volunteers were paid to ingest the chemical and then from that data a safe threshold was set.

    As Steve Milloy writes in an article on the controversy,

There is much less uncertainty if human testing is involved,so acceptable exposure levels are usually set 19 times lower than the “no effect” dose. Because human testing involves a lower safety factor, it often leads to a higher permitted exposure levels. But pesticide opponents want lower permitted exposure levels — preferably so low that pesticide use is not practical.

    In other words, when manufacturers test a chemical in human beings, it often turns out to be safer than animal data would otherwise suggest. But the EPA gets funding and publicity for banning unsafe compounds, and so it has taken the only recourse left to it — attacking human testing.

    Essentially the EPA claims it is unethical to use even consenting human subjects to test the safety of an insecticide and in Dursban’s case says that none of the human testing data can be used to measure it safety. So what’s left? A study of pregnant rats who were fed large doses of Dursban, resulting in maternal sickness which in turn led to damage of the fetuses.

    So even though the human safety data indicates Dursban is perfectly safe at concentrations it is sold in, the EPA recently banned the insecticide except when used at a level 1,000 times lower than the human safety data indicate is necessary — effectively making it impossible to use for controlling insects in the home.

    This is a ridiculous position that undermines the elementary principles of medical research — extensive animal testing followed by clinical trials in human beings. As Jay Goodman, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Michigan State University wrote to the EPA:

I view the testing in question as being similar to the clinical trials of potential new drugs and I do not see that it presents an ethical problem. A very large body of animal data provides a strong base to embark on human testing.

    The EPA claim that testing compounds on human beings is unethical even after extensive safety testing in nonhuman animals has been done is as wrongheaded as the animal rights view that testing should be done only in human beings. Animal and human tests each form part of the puzzle, and neither can completely replace the other.

    Multiple sclerosis is a degenerative nervous system disorder where the protective sheath that surrounds nerves, called myelin, is damaged, interfering with the nerves’ abilities to send message back and forth along the nervous system. Regenerating the myelin sheath would seem to be the obvious way to treat MS and similar illnesses, but the problem is that cells in the nervous system are particularly resistant to regeneration.

    Thanks to animal experiments there has been a lot of progress made in recent years in understanding why cells in the nervous system don’t regenerate along with progress on spurring them to regenerate. In the latest advance, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, discovered antibodies which prod the immune systems of mice to repair the myelin sheath. The antibody attaches itself to nerve cells called oligodendrocytes which are responsible for the manufacture of myelin.

    Researchers infected mice with a virus that attacks the myelin sheath and causes symptoms in mice similar to MS in human beings. When the antibody was then injected into the mice, the damage to the myelin sheat was reversed.

    This does not mean, however, that a treatment for MS is right around the corner. This intriguing finding does, however, up open up many avenues for future research. In the real world of science, as opposed to the straw man posited by animal rights activists, important advances in understanding human physiology and disease first require years and decades of basic research aimed at understanding and explaining activities and functions that still mystify scientists. This is but one in a long series of experiments that bring us closer to the day when a viable cure for MS might be found.

Source:

Scientists reverse MS in mice. The BBC, June 5, 2000.

    The Public Health Service recently issued guidelines for Xenotransplantation — the transplanting of animal cells, tissues and organs to treat or mitigate human diseases. As the background statement to the guidelines notes, 13 people in the United States die every day while waiting for an organ transplant and any advance that utilized animal tissues or organs would save many lives.

    There are legitimate concerns about risks, however. The biggest fear, which the activists latch onto, is the risk of passing a disease from a non-human to a human. After all, for as long as humans have domesticated animals or used them as a source of food, diseases have passed between animals and humans. The most familiar of these diseases is the influenza virus which relies on several different species, including humans, pigs, and birds, as disease vectors in which it thrives and mutates.

    It is certainly reasonable to take some precautions, but the message of the activists is that there is no acceptable risk. The misnamed Campaign for Responsible Transplantation, for example, immediately denounced the new guidelines as inadequate largely because they believe that it is impossible for Xenotransplantation to be risk free. Instead the CRT’s Alix Fano wants the United States to adopt the “precautionary principle.” This essentially means always minimizing risk regardless of the possible benefit, which very few people seem to actually agree with if their behavior is any evidence (if you regularly drive a car, for example, you are implicitly rejecting the precautionary principle.)

    There is also a certain irony that much of the legitimate fear of a possible spread of a disease across species boundaries comes from the very animal research which Fano and others believe is done for no better reason than to enrich the pockets of scientists. For example, the PHS guidelines note that researchers have shown that simian foamy virus in baboons has been found to persist in human beings who received liver cell transplantations from human beings. Similarly, in vitro research has demonstrated that retrovirus carried by pigs can infect human cell lines. This stuff scares the anti-xeno activists to death, but then again I thought all these claims that human and non-human physiologies were very close was just corporate double talk?

    The proposed guidelines find the reasonable middle ground — researchers should do everything possible to minimize the risk of this happening, but the risk is not great enough to forego the advantages of this technology. The PHS calls for a strict regimen of monitoring and health surveillance system coupled with strict requirements for animal procurement which will reduce the risk of a highly infectious agent ever crossing the boundary between animals and human beings through xenotransplantation very low.

    For example, the obvious way to reduce risk of transmitting diseases is to use animals that are free of diseases. The PHS guidelines call for “procuring source animals from herds or colonies that are screened and qualified as free of specific pathogenic infectious agents and that are maintained in an environment that reduces exposure to vectors of infectious agents.” Essentially this means implementing what the industry had already been moving to — animals intended for Xenotransplantation use will be special breeding populations that are kept under special clean laboratory conditions. Of course, the activists will complain in turn that this violates the welfare of the animals.

    Which is really the point of CRT despite all its attempts to sound like a scientifically-minded public interest group. Most people might consider the idea using cells from animals to perhaps cure diabetes as a good thing, but not CPT:

Who will decide how much animal suffering is justified? Up to 100 pig fetuses may be needed for a single transplantation of pig pancreatic islet cells into a diabetic patient. Each patient may need several transplants during the course of treatment. That’s a lot of pigs for one person.

    Not even pigs, after all, but pig fetuses.

Sources:

Anti-Xenotransplanation Coalition Denounces New Federal Guideline. Press release, Campaign for Responsible Transplantation, May 31, 2000.

Public Health Service Guideline on Infectious Disease Issues in Xenotransplantation. Public Health Service, 2000.

    Activists on both sides of the Atlantic have decided to target, of all companies, the Bank of New York. What is BNY’s sins in the eyes of the activists? BNy owns 41 million shares of Huntington Life Sciences — the large EUropean research laboratory.

    A press release by Stop Huntington ANimal Cruelty included a quote from Joe Bateman saying, “We want Bank of New York to sell its 41 million shares in HLS. Their investment is not saving human lives nor supporting valuable research.”

    The press release practically gloats that Huntington “…has been the object of firebombs because of its cruel treatment of animals” (which would be accurate if written as “…has been the object of firebombs because of the irrational ignorance of some animal rights activists) and that “…workers for the Huntington Life Sciences have been targeted with arson attacks at their homes in Europe in recent weeks.”

    But, of course, it is the researchers who are cruel and unreasonable.

Source:

“Bank of New York Target of Protest; Activists Want BNY to Sell Research Lab Stock.” Press release, Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty, May 18, 2000.