Products and Animal Testing Research Assignment Paper

Animal Testing
Animal testing is an issue that has continued splitting opinion, especially since the start of the last century. Companies have continued using animals as a specimen for testing their products, so as to determine the effectiveness and risk of the same when for human consumption. This has prompted animal rights activists and other animal sympathizers to continue raging an ideological war over the ethics of the practice. Animal testing might be taken as cruel, but its importance by far proves that it is a necessity. Although animal testing brings about suffering and even death of the animals amid recent advancement in molecular technology, it has been useful in the creation of life-saving and life-changing drugs as well as vaccines.
To adequately address this issue, it is important to look at the advantages and disadvantages of animal testing. Among the benefits, animal testing ensures that any product, especially of medicinal value, undergoes extensive and intensive testing within a living organism, so as to ascertain its activity. In this manner, the effectiveness, side effects and any other contraindicative aspects of the drug are noted (Watson). It would be better to do the tests on animals since their bodies offer almost similar conditions to that of human beings.
Secondly, animal testing helps in determining the toxicity of particular compounds or chemicals, such as radioactive rays or poison. The tests done on an animal can help scientists establish the amount of such compounds that are helpful, and which levels become harmful (Francione). From one perspective, testing such on animals helps save human lives, since where it not for animals, then live people would be needed as the specimen for the testing. The importance of animal testing can be traced back to the thalidomide disaster of the 1950s and 60s, when a drug was approved without undergoing all the safety measures as per the FDA. It was then later found to be the primary cause of congenital disabilities and other complications in pregnant w...