
{"id":4456,"date":"2009-01-08T07:26:25","date_gmt":"2009-01-08T15:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=4456"},"modified":"2009-01-09T12:35:53","modified_gmt":"2009-01-09T20:35:53","slug":"letter-lab-expansion-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2009\/01\/08\/letter-lab-expansion-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter: Lab expansion wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>UNC is expanding its animal research labs and storage facilities. This is as backwards as ignoring solar energy to build more coal-burning power plants, since medical advances have rendered most animal research outdated. In 2008 Medical News Today reported advancements in human brain imaging were proving better at devising pain management for conditions like osteoarthritis than decades of animal research.<!--more--> Cancer research projects using complex 3D human cell cultures and mathematical modeling are also proving superior to animal experiments. In 2008 CNN Health ran the headline \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Scientist: Stem cells could end animal testing,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d citing the superiority of human stem cell research to animal research. Using human cell tissue to develop vaccines is also considered safer than using animals, since undetected animal viruses may jump the species barrier (think SARS). In 2007 the US National Academy of Sciences\u00c2\u00a0recommended less reliance on animals in toxicology studies and more focus on in vitro methods using cells \u00e2\u20ac\u0153preferably of human origin\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in order to generate \u00e2\u20ac\u0153more relevant data.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In 2004 the British Medical Journal published an article [titled] \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Where is the evidence that animal research benefits humans?,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d stating animal research had inherent flaws and that funding for animal research was holding back clinical research and medical innovations.<br \/>\nThe fact is, animal research doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t carry over well to humans. For example, the arthritis drug Vioxx tested safe and even beneficial to the heart in animal tests but was pulled from the market after causing an estimated 320,000 cases of heart attacks and strokes in humans.\u00c2\u00a0And sometimes it goes the other way. For example, penicillin was discovered in 1929 but wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t used until 1939 because its failure to cure infected rabbits had convinced researchers it was worthless. There are hundreds of similar examples.<\/p>\n<p>So UNC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s expansion of its animal research and storage facilities gives us the following: outdated medical research; needless animal suffering (ever wonder why there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not more discussion on this?); air pollution from incinerators used to burn the dead bodies of hundreds of animals; and potential harm to our environment and possibly humans due to the spraying of the treated (but not treated to drinking level safety) animal research waste water into our forests.<\/p>\n<p>Why does our government continue doling out grants (your tax dollars) for outdated animal research? The Medical Research Modernization Committee has suggested part of the problem is resistance to change (like we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen in the energy sector). But maybe a bigger question is why aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t local activist groups devising a plan of action to lobby legislators in Raleigh on this issue?<br \/>\n<em><br \/>\nRobin Cutson<br \/>\nChapel Hill<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>UNC is expanding its animal research labs and storage facilities. This is as backwards as ignoring solar energy to build more coal-burning power plants, since medical advances have rendered most animal research outdated. In 2008 Medical News Today reported advancements in human brain imaging were proving better at devising pain management for conditions like osteoarthritis&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4456"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4544,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4456\/revisions\/4544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}