The Use of Animals For Medical Research essays

The Use of Animals For Medical Research essays VICTORIES IN THE WAR AGAINST DISEASE Once upon a time, not so many years ago, each summer brought fear of a deadly, paralyzing disease, which struck mostly children and young adults. This killer cut short the lives of hundreds of young people every year, and made long-life cripples out of many survivors. For many adults living now, this terrible disease, polio, is a distant memory. For most young people, it is subject they may have read about in a school book. Because it is all but gone, polio and its terrible effects, and the fear it brought to millions, virtually no longer exist in America. Why? Polio has disappeared because of vaccines developed by medical researchers in the late 1950s. Vaccines PREVENT certain illnesses by building immunity in the body. Other once common diseaes that have been totally or partially conquered because of vaccines include: smallpox, rubella, whooping cough, typhoid fever, diphtheria, and tetanus. Rabies vaccine protects animals from this dreadful disease that can kill humans, too. Anthrax and brucellosis vaccines protect farm animals from those diseases. All of these vaccines have one thing in common. We could not have these wonderful vaccines if it werent for animal research. Thousands and thousands, perhaps millions of children and adults would have died or suffered long-life disabilities if it had not been for careful, painstaking research done by scientists using animal tissues and animal models for human and animal diseases. Even more recently-in the last thirty years or so many people, because of mental illness known as schizophrenia, wee condemned to living life in mental hospitals or sanitariums. These victims could not function in normal society. Now, the majority of these people live at home, and many live and work very much like everyone else. Medical researchers, using animal research, have developed drugs of TREATMENT for schizophrenia, and other major m...