In 1985, at the height of the Aids epidemic, scientists in the US made a huge breakthrough in understanding this mysterious, deadly disease by isolating the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) in captive rhesus macaques. A few years later, they successfully developed the first effective therapy against HIV/Aids, which gave researchers a foothold to continue investigating the disease.
Today, anti-retroviral therapies have advanced to such an extent that people living with HIV can easily manage the condition with a simple drug regimen and can even suppress HIV levels in the blood to undetectable levels. None of this, or countless other medical advances, would have been possible without animal-based research.
So why are we seeing so many attacks by politicians, activists and even the media on this fundamental aspect of scientific research?
Australian university defends using greyhounds for heart transplant study
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Earlier this month, Crikey published an article about the use of greyhounds in a study conducted by researchers from Monash University and the Alfred Hospital. The words “grisly” and “gruesome” were thrown in to elicit a specific response: outrage and disgust.
The Age then published its own story on the same experiment that used similarly emotive language but took things a step further by heavily featuring the voices of animal rights activists. In both instances, the articles were unashamedly one-sided and demonised not just the researchers involved the study, but the use of animals in science in general. So, what exactly was the experiment in question?
The researchers were investigating how well they could preserve a heart once an organ donor had died and before transplantation occurs, with the aim of improving the success rate of heart transplants in humans. In order to test this, they anaesthetised 12 greyhounds – they were knocked unconscious to prevent any pain or suffering – before they were suffocated to induce circulatory death. The hearts were then removed and preserved for four hours using two different methods of preservation. Half of the dogs then received a heart transplant and were revived to monitor how well the heart functioned before they were promptly euthanised.
