Former “Baywatch”babe Pamela Anderson pointedly passed on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge — because the ALS Association funds research that uses rodents.
Never mind that medical research using animals has saved millions of lives — and helped animals, too. Her animal-rights beliefs come first — and indeed, lead her to promote lots of lies about research.
Sadly, she’s not alone. A May 2013 Gallup poll found that a whopping 39 percent of Americans (and an even greater share of those aged 18 to 34) say medical testing on animals is morally wrong.
Funny: Only 5 percent of the population is vegetarian. So lots of folks are willing to eat factory-farmed meat but object to life-saving research from animals.
Part of the problem is that many think animal research provides little of scientific value. They’re wrong.
On her Facebook post, which quickly garnered over 110,000 likes and over 15,000 comments, Anderson claims there is a “massive failure rate” of medical experiments on animals. This claim parrots PETA’s contention that animal studies are irrelevant to human health.
Not so. The California Biomedical Research Association, for example, documents how “virtually every medical breakthrough in human and animal health has been the direct result of research using animals.”
This includes saving the lives of diabetics through the discovery of insulin and the testing of the polio vaccine on animals, which reduced the global epidemic of the disease from “350,000 cases in 1998 to 223 in 2012.”
Animal studies have also been key to “understanding and treating breast cancer, brain injury, childhood leukemia, cystic fibrosis, malaria, multiple sclerosis, tuberculosis, and many others.”
The only statistic Anderson cites is to note that 92 percent of drugs that pass animal trials fail in human trials. So what? The animal pre-testing keeps a large percentage of dangerous drugs from entering human trials in the first place.
Note, too, that Anderson had no qualms accepting the benefits of scientific testing on animals when she effectively treated her Hepatitis C, which is a disease now better understood and treated due to extensive testing on animals. And the safety of her multiple breast implant surgeries was ensured by testing on dogs.
Those that care about animal welfare should also support this research. An estimated 80 medicines and vaccines discovered via animal research are now also used to treat animals fighting rabies, distemper, feline leukemia, tetanus, infectious hepatitis virus and more.
Plus, new reproductive techniques discovered through animal testing have helped preserve nearly extinct species, including the California condor and the tamarins of Brazil.
Anderson also gets it wrong on ALS research itself, claiming that the one animal clinical test that “‘passed’ offers only marginal benefits to humans who suffer from ALS.”
If she or a loved one were one of the 30,000 Americans afflicted with ALS, would she be so callous about a “marginal” benefit, especially when we have no cure?
In any case, the ALS Association confirms that “significant advances have been made in ALS and other neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease using . . . rodents, flies and worms to better understand disease mechanisms and to develop therapies.”
Finally, she’s wrong about research on animals being “outdated and ineffective.” Using non-animal models for biomedical research may be ideal where possible, since it eliminates animal suffering, but it’s not enough.
As the London-based group Understanding Animal Research explains, the species used in medical research share 95 percent or more genes with humans, have live complex “nervous system, blood and brain chemistry, gland and organ secretions, and immunological responses [that] are all interrelated, making it impossible to explore” or duplicate in a lab.
In the end, facts don’t matter to Anderson, PETA and the rest of the animal-rights crowd — because their objection is ideological, not scientific. They’d object even if the survival of humanity depended on animal research, because they equate humans to animals — as PETA admits on its Web site.
Sorry, Pamela: It’s fine, maybe even admirable, to strip naked to urge humane treatment of pets, combat cruel factory-farming or oppose unnecessary animal testing (as in the cosmetics industry).
But openly lying about the effectiveness of scientific research that has saved millions of lives is just wrong.
Eliyahu Federman has written for the Huffington Post, USA Today, Fox News and others.