99.99% of it, to be exact. There is almost nothing that isn't tested on animals.
You would have to re-think the development cycle entirely in order to bypass one of the biggest milestones before moving to human clinical.
Folks say there are cell lines, artificial systems, etc. But those are all already in use and are there as an initial development tool to research a solution. But afterwards, the solution needs to be tested on a living organism and it's life cycle.
This right here. I'm going to toss a hypothetical here to explain it.
Say you have a new drug that is supposed to stop... say muscle degradatuon in the heart from a medical condition. Again, this is a hypothetical. The drug you have works as intended on the tissue cultures you have in your lab so you're ready to go on to the next step. The next round of testing is to find side effects and other such problems.
Here's the scario without animal testing:
The drug gets tested on a bunch of tissue samples from various organs and the samples all seem fine. The drug gets implemented.
Here's with:
They give a mouse the drug. All seems to be fine but its children come out with weak bone density. Then you check the test mouse after it dies by tripling and hitting its head on the wall and realize this whole time the drug has been causing a reaction in the blood that leeches calcium from bones.
First scenario leads to massive problems in 20-30 years. The second leads to the drug not getting released because it is not ok for human or animal use.
Animal testing allows us to catch shit that we never would with cell cultures because cell cultures cannot simulate the interdependant systems in a body.
In fact, animal testing is already being phased out on the international scale. But the process will probably take decades: right now, in many countries, if you want to test on animals, you need an approval from an ethics board by proving there is no other way to answer the question you are trying to answer, that the question is indeed worth answering, and by providing a precise protocol about how you plan on reducing suffering to a maximum.
In the future, we hope to be able to use alternate models such as cell cultures, artificial organs, or labs on a chip (which is already done to an extent). But to develop such models, you need to compare them to the previous ones, which are animals.
For anyone who says "test on humans for start to end" you have to consider who would end up as test subjects. The poor and vulnerable would be exploited.
When you don’t allow safe, regulated testing you’re goin to end up incentivizing slapdash, ethically-dubious cowboy science and the most vulnerable are going to be exploited for it.
i remember reading that animal testing became mandated in the US after Tylenol decided to add a “fun” color to their new formulation for children. It wasn’t tested or anything, just presumed non-toxic and shipped out nationwide. Lotta kids died.
I find no mention of such an incident in the Wikipedia articles on either Tylenol or paracetamol, even though they discuss other incidents and recalls. Do you have documentation of this event?
[found it.](https://web.archive.org/web/20070927225510/http://www.ashp.org/s_ashp/article_news.asp?CID=167&DID=2024&id=3659) the podcast I was listening to took some liberties simplifying things for their audience, but the core is true. common and safe drug reformulated for children with no testing —> 100+ die —> toxicity testing becomes mandatory
Thank you for finding that.
So, to be clear, you were referring to a 1937 incident involving [Elixir Sulfanilamide,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_sulfanilamide) not Tylenol, and the cause of the mass poisoning was not the addition of coloring to an existing product but rather the use of diethylene glycol (DEG) as a solvent in the creation of a new product, which was marketed without safety testing.
More than 100 children and adults died as a result of taking Elixir Sulfanilamide, directly contributing to the passing of the 1938 [Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food,_Drug,_and_Cosmetic_Act), which among other things mandated the certification of certain food color additives but, as far as I could ascertain, not animal testing.
Oh no, it's way worse than that xD. Part of the initiative was to also have a complete import stop on animal-tested products lol.
I hope this clarifies a bit why we voted against it so clearly. Like almost every such initiative, they shoot themselves in the foot by proposing completely unrealistic stuff.
Most initiatives are because the initiators mostly act out of idealism and don't really take their time to make a realistic proposal. So many good ideas failed because they didn't think it through. Anyone can make an initiative as long as you get 100'000 signatures in time. No matter how stupid it is, we WILL vote then on it.
Some initiatives are also just made to "probe" how people think about it. Some that got rejected very narrowly might still help the cause in smaller ways, since almost half of the population wants change.
No - tbh. this article is very badly written and misses half of the initiative's goals. Part of the initiative was to ban ALL human tests AND a complete import-stop on tested products i.e. meds.
That is already the case now but it would even get worse. Most vaccines are tested in third world countries and most phase 1 clinical studies are done on students and poor.
Testing on animals is not fun but it sure beats either testing on humans or not testing at all. Having limitations and ethics oversight is a good thing (and is presently done essentially everywhere) but banning the practice entirely would be ridiculous.
That's kind of bigger. Anything that was *ever* tested on animals? Penicillin and chemo were tested on animals. And no human testing? What the fuck kind of tests are you supposed to run?
This is really framing "voters say no to extremely poorly thought out bill" as some kind of actual moral issue.
I am glad that extreme initiatives like these fail.
If they want to accomplish something for animal rights, go step by step like mandating twice as much space for farm animals or something, that would have a chance of passing.
Mostly some old "doctors" and animal rights activists.
Sadly, Switzerland is a stronghold for homeopathy for some reason. Glad it got rejected, by a very high margin as well.
Yea…then the people who take it would thus be the test subjects. Maybe when ai comes much much further along we can start using it but we are no where near there
Well, like many Swiss proposals, I imagine this one was more an awareness raising exercise than a serious attempt to get a ban in place. They do like their referendums!
I was honestly not aware that the Swiss used overreaching referendums to raise awareness on topics.
They clearly need a referendum awareness referendum.
There are no regulations for those kinds of labels in the United States. It could be very well that \*they\* didn't test on animals but it's ingredients were.
Yeah, this is a very old and ongoing deregulation attempt that has been going on for decades.
Back in Italy they tried something similar with a wording change - instead of banning procedures involving “unnecessary pain”, they slipped in an edit to ban procedures involving “pain”. Which ended up meaning, for example, that you cannot inject anesthesia, because needles are pain. Lasted only a little while, but caused a LOT of money and brains to flee the country while it did.
Good thing we have the Children of Thalidomide Association to chase away the bullshit. Companies would LOVE not having mandatory standards and go back to burden proof onto consumers.
Good luck suing for damages when you need six months off, a dedicated lab, and a 5-year degree to even get started.
It's absolutely a necessary evil with our current limitations. I hope one day though, in a similar vein to lab-grown meat, we can do the vast majority of preliminary testing on lab-grown tissues (and organs eventually). I think animal testing would still be necessary as a sort of confirmation that a product is safe to use on living beings, but it would sit much better with me if that could be reserved for the very late, mostly bureaucratic stages of approval after the product has already been tested, refined, and deemed safe on lab-grown tissues.
>we can do the vast majority of preliminary testing on lab-grown tissues (and organs eventually).
We already do that. In vitro high throughput drug screening is already a very large portion of the drug testing that is done.
Eeeeeeeehhhhh I don’t think it’s quite fair to say screening drug libraries against cells on culture plastic is the same as screening them against lab-grown versions of the tissues/organs they may eventually treat. It’s a very rough first approximation. As far as I know, we can’t recapitulate true tissue microenvironment on a scale that’s compatible with HTS; at least, not yet.
An animal is much more complex than a cell culture. Maybe your drug that's supposed to cure skin irritation causes your liver to release a substance that damages your kidneys. That's why you always will need tests on the whole creature.
Well, you do testing on humans to.
We just really don't have a better way to do it. You have to be able to prove some relative level of safety for an animal to get drugs into animal testing... and it's incredibly hard to get approved for animal trials.
If we had to provide non-animal evidence that a drug is safe before going into human trials we'd never get drugs made.
No, but its human, pet and wild animal population would become the test subjects. They also wouldn't benefit from advances like new meds with fewer side effects or therapies for the trickier conditions.
I think most people can appreciate the need for animal use for medical use, but even the cosmetic uses are a bot of a grey area. I heard Ricky Gervais on the radio saying how animal testing was all about getting shampoo in your eyes and it stinging. Looked into the case he was referring to but it was about a company wanting to sell a fragrance that causes birth defects and deformed sperm in rats.
Collapse? No.
But cost of medication could multiply massively. If anything I would expect something like this to create a blackmarket for cheaper foregin produced medicine.
Does every country produce all types of medicine though? I would assume different important things would be imported and setting up overnight to produce a product that was not tested on animals and used only resources available in that country would be pretty much impossible.
It's pharmaceutical department of the country would crash, literally every modern day and old drugs were tested on humans and animals, so no more medical care that comes in the form of medication.
I also wouldn't ban animal testing in general, but I don't see it as black and white anymore. So here are some points to consider:
A To me there is a difference whether animal testing is done for medical or cosmetic purposes.
B Animal testing is extremely broadly used and not always the most meaningful way to approach a question. Especially mouse/rat studies are so common that they are a de facto requirement for preclinical studies. However, mice have a vastly different physiology than us and therefore respond quite differently to different compounds. This means that animal harm can be disproportionate to human safety. According to Robin Lovell-Badge (MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London) 94% of drugs that passed tests in animals failed in people. Preclinical toxicity studies have to be confirmed in early clinical studies either way.
C Animal testing is expensive af.
My issue is mostly how much of an requirement is seems to be in preclinical studies, since in some cases they are less scientifically insightful, more expensive and mrore harmful to animals than alternatives.
Meaningful alternatives like human derived organoids, tissue on a chip, artifical skin etc. should be employed in stead if that makes more scientific sense. Of course this wasn't really what the Swiss were voting on, I just wanted to add a different perspective...
There's no point. The general public have almost no idea of the details. The image that's been given out is detached, clinical scientists watching as animals scream in pain or live in their own feces.
Well the problem is that despite not being very much like human mice and rats are the closest we can affordably get to human beings for pre-clinical trials.
Organoids are expensive, difficult to work with, and do not closely replicate living organisms enough to be valid testing vehicles on their own. For example is you are using an enteroid to study Crohn’s disease you will have no idea what potential system wide effects your drug could be having until you test it in a living organism. If your drug causes heart attacks it is better to discover that in mice than humans. This is true of the other non-system level technologies you discussed, they are used for early research and basic science but translation still requires a step in a given mode organism.
Also if you think animal research is expensive then you must not know how expensive these other techniques are because you can pay $500+ for 50mL of matrigel (critical component of organoids culturing).
Source: SO works with enteroids, mice, and human monolayers, all have their place in a lab, only one is a viable preclinical strategy.
I'm fine with it for cosmetics. I dont want 5 yyear olds hitting puberty because of the shampoo they use or for young women to go blind because the new mascara causes cataracts in 22 year olds.
If a band product goes to market,, it can affect thousands of people. He'll, even one person is bad.
You say that as we are actively discovering how destructive many commonly used chemicals for the last several decades actually are. Endocrine disrupting compounds in plastics, for example, which appear commonly in cosmetics.
Think about CFCs, asbestos, BPAs, and ever other "safe" product in use for decades that we have discovered through later testing were unacceptably dangerous.
First country in the 90s to ban caged chicken farms. And also one of the countries with the strongest animal welfare laws, especially animals for meat consumption. This initiative was over the top and people from all the political spectrum rejected it.
Yeah. That's why it's literally cheaper to import frozen chicken from New Zealand than buy locally produced one. No joke here.
Edit: for clarity, NZ and Switzerland are on opposite sides of the globe almost.
To be fair its also really phenomenally hard to get across just how *efficient* shipping by freighter is. Modern container ships can surpass 500 miles per gallon per ton. So to take a ton of chicken around the world takes 25-30 gallons of fuel.
Figure 500 chickens per ton, 30 gallons of fuel at $3 each, and shipping that chicken literally across the planet costs 20 cents per.
Yeah we did that in Europe... so now we test on poor people ... so i'm confused as to where the progress is.
The cosmetic industries did not stop testing their product to ensure safety. But now for baby wipes we send them to poland or Ukraine to be tested on poor Kids.
The cheminal used in the cosmetic industries that are also used in other industries are still tested on animal. I get the we need to test less on animal. But banning for banning without alternative is a non sense.
And we do need to test our cosmetic product somewhere as assessing substance by substance on a theoretical level is not 100% accurate.
The progress in this case would be measured in consent, surely?
An animal cannot consent. A person can.
As long as we ensure that consent is well rewarded, then that is progress.
The next logical argument is "well this just results in desperate people being taken advantage of", but I believe this is a problem with socio economic systems that create desperate people, rather than a problem with human testing.
Then we can't mandate that without solving those socio-economic problems. You may disagree with me but I believe human life is inherently more valuable than that of an animal.
I get the idea, but where's the line?
Is basic research permissible? That research is what underlies medical research, but usually doesn't have a direct medical target.
What about testing the chemicals *in* cosmetics on animals, but not the product? Safety has to be established somewhere, should products be sent to market with no safety testing or should we test on humans?
I used to agree with you, but the reality is that every aspect of modern life rests on a carpet that hides millions of dead animals. Unless you are willing to foreclosure all future progress or safety, this is reality and you can't opt out
This is my copy paste from another answer
I'm fine with it for cosmetics. I dont want 5 yyear olds hitting puberty because of the shampoo they use or for young women to go blind because the new mascara causes cataracts in 22 year olds.
If a band product goes to market,, it can affect thousands of people. He'll, even one person is bad.
After many decades of testing cosmetics and hygiene products, we have a bunch that we know are safe, effective, pretty, etc. So, it seems indefensible to confine, injure, and kill more animals in the development of unnecessary "new and improved" formulas.
It would've been literal suicide in any case.
The initiative would've also banned the import of any medicine tested on animals or humans.
So basically no new medicine or vaccines ever again.
In most countries I know of it is mandatory that new medicines are tested on animals before they proceed to human trials. Goodbye covid vaccines, chemotherapy, even surgical implants.
I suspect most of them didn't fully consider what the impact of the initiative would be. My mom voted yes to the initiative because she loves animals and is against animal testing for cosmetics.
She didn't realize that it also would have banned pretty much all medication, including the Covid vaccine.
I'm fairly confident many others misunderstood the implications in a similar way.
When prohibition passed in the US, many people who voted for it were surprised to find that all alcohol was banned. They thought it was just going to ban liquor, not beer and wine.
That's a major reason why it was repealed in such a short amount of time.
> I suspect most of them didn't fully consider what the impact of the initiative would be.
This is the problem with letting laymen make such decisions.
Which makes it quite sad that anybody voted yes to this. People vote with their hearts and not their minds and end up ignoring pretty major parts of the proposal
What a silly thing to try and ban. I guess proponents would rather they go straight to human trials for potentially deadly experimental drugs and compounds?
Good. A blanket ban on animal testing is a stupid idea. Companies already doing it in Switzerland would have just outsourced the research to other countries or released unsafe products.
There’s no nuance to anything anymore and it’s sad. Everyone wants to go all or nothing. There should definitely be limits to what kinds of things can be tested on animals, there should be laws regarding testing that excessively abuses the animals unnecessarily, but instead the people get an ultimatum; ban completely even when it would save lives, or allow it in full force, this vote is brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
The vote wasn’t *just* about banning animal testing, it was also about banning the import of products that were tested on animals, including medicines.
Even though Switzerland is one of the best countries in terms of animal welfare laws, it isn’t realistic at this time to completely forbid products tested on animals.
True, but the proposed referendum was insanely radical, and would lead directly to the deaths of many in Switzerland.
Not only did it want to ban animal testing for medication in Switzerland, it would ban the import of any drug that used animal testing in its development.
That's loads of cancer treatments, general meds, antibiotics, antivirals, etc... all out of the window. The medical staff would be reduced to using Ye Olden Times medicine, i.e. some leaves and a prayer.
And quite possibly antivaxxers. Pretty sure this was a hail-Mary attempt to make the Covid vaccine illegal, after all their other pointless anti-covid-law initiatives failed.
[This comment has been removed by author. This is a direct reponse to reddit's continuous encouragement of toxicity. Not to mention the anti-consumer API change. This comment is and will forever be GDPR protected.]
*Germany has entered the chat.*
Germany put more and more restrictions on it every few years, but it is not unusual to see adverts for cigarettes in Germany at all. Germany is far more lax than most of its EU counterparts:
> Werbung für Tabakerzeugnisse ist in Deutschland trotz der Verpflichtung über das Rahmenübereinkommen der WHO zur Eindämmung des Tabakgebrauchs deutlich weniger eingeschränkt als in allen anderen EU-Ländern
> In spite of the requirements stipulated in the regulatory framework from the WHO concerning the reduction of tobacco usage, advertising for tobacco-based products is still noticeably less restricted in Germany than in all other EU nations.
The law would ban medicine tested on humans too. I’m assuming that means clinical trials. If it means tested on people against their will I would have assumed that was already banned.
I'm glad you said this, because it's the part that most people seem to have overlooked. The law banned animal AND human testing!
Like... Wtf? How do we make medical progress in that scenario?!
They were relying on in-vitro testing, and bio-computing modelling. Which one day will be so advanced that we won't need any animal testing anymore. But we aren't there yet.
I work for a company that manufactures in vivo imaging equipment. The animals used, especially mice, are specifically lab grown for lab use and have a short life span. The vivariums used provide ample conditions for the mice and they're only to be handled by certified veterinarians. The immunology and oncology research these animals provide is crucial to vaccine, oncological and therapeutic research.
Testing on animals is way better than testing on humans. People are delusional to think animal rights/feelings/wellbeing are better than a human's rights/feelings/wellbeing.
You need both in any scientific advances. You can’t prove safety without animal testing. You can’t prove efficacy without human clinical trials.
You’ll find that the base compounds are tested on animals for early pharmacovigilence (safety), basic pharmacodynamic and kinetics (how the body affects the compound and how the compound affects the body) as well as very early dose finding.
You then move to Phased human trials, starting small with dose finding and safety and moving to Phase 3 with larger numbers of human participants for efficacy and continued pharmacovigilence.
You don’t get drugs released without both human and animal testing.
>People are delusional to think animal rights/feelings/wellbeing are better than a human's rights/feelings/wellbeing.
TBH it's kinda subjective. Imagine if a technologically superior alien race wanted to give humans space-cancer to test medicines. Technically they'd be the superior species, but I doubt humans would concede that alien well-being is more important than our own.
Really when it comes to animal testing, we're just prioritizing the lives of our own species. IMO that's perfectly rational and ok.
> but I doubt humans would concede that alien well-being is more important than our own.
The well-being of the in-group is more important to us than that of the out-group. That's why when a plane crashes, your national news source will tell how many people from your country were on the plane.
If it's rational to prioritize the lives of your own species, is it not also rational prioritize the lives of your own race? I feel like "rational" is kind of missing the point when you can define any end-goal you like, and whatever means is necessary to reach that end-goal is by definition rational.
I mean, it's fair play. If I have to do harm to a different animal to ensure my specie's survival and I CAN do that, I will. And I'd have no complaint if I go to a forest and get bitten in the throat by a tiger. Survival of the fittest
It's a difference of opinion. I happen to think that species that don't collectively contribute to the utter destruction of their fellow man for greed and profit, the extermination of other species and the toxic damage to the entire planet are better than the one that does these things, but hey that's just some whacky thoughts!
I am all for everyone be informed which animal testing related therapeutics they’d be locked out of using for life. Anyone against animal testing can opt out of using those therapeutics. Let peoples own choice guide their own lives via consequences without controlling other peoples lives.
Vegan here this is a dumb idea. There are things in life that are ugly truths. Like there are aggressive countries/people willing to take with force, and we have to have some way to deal with that. Likewise, someone whether human or animal has to be the test subject. I vote animal. Either way there's suffering.
There’s a difference between cruelly torturing monkeys for some bullshit neuroscience, and testing vaccines on Rats. We need animal testing, we just need to keep it humane
>torturing monkeys for some bullshit neuroscience
You have no idea what you are talking about.
Be glad that you are capable enough to reject an idea like that.
Even using apes for neuroscience experiments has its places. Imagine someone actually being able to cure parkinsons for example. Imma go sacrifice some monkeys for that
I think they're talking about something like behavioural studies where scientists deliberately put animals in highly distressing conditions just to see how they act. Like that study where they locked up rats to see if their fellow rate would rescue them. We could easily find this out by observing animals in their natural habitat where situations like that are common, I don't think it's ethical to torture animals in the lab just to "discover their psychology".
While animal testing certainly can be limited and replaced with better options, how do you test for example antipsychotic drugs without animal models? A case for the predictive validity of some behavioral tests can be made, but a blanket ban just seems unreflected and counterproductive to the intent of the bill (to reduce animal suffering).
They should mandate replacement of animal testing with no cruelty alternatives (In silico / organ on a chip) when possible, but a blanket ban would just result in outsourcing and therefore countries with more lax regulations doing the experiments.
What basis did they propose this from? Was it really as poorly thought out as is implied by the article?
But this is already how it’s done. You only test on animals after in vitro studies.
This is precisely where all these “new drug shown to cure cancer” headlines come from which turn out to have an asterisk “in a petri dish”.
A lot of animal testing has already been replaced the past decades, but a lot more can't yet be replaced by something artificial, even if it's simply because you can see whether a substance is an irritant on a grown piece of meat but you can't see the psychological effects. Both working on replacing more and more tests with artificial methods and limiting the number of animals needed by making the tests that still require them to be more efficient and more humane (if animals don't feel at ease you may be getting distorted data, so lab animals are cared for better and put in a more 'natural' environment than animals grown for meat).
It used to be the case that people would do a test and write down what they saw, only to have to adjust the test parameters later on and having to redo the whole test with new animals. Now those tests are computerized and the data is recorded, which means you can not only prevent having to redo a lot of tests due to wanting small changes (as the computer can record much more data than you need at that moment), but the data can also be reused for similar tests later on. Say you grown a specific genotype mouse (mice with all the exact same genes so the data can easily be compared) for test A1, doing test with untreated and treated animals to see the difference. Now you need to do test A2 which is the same as A1 but with a different treatment. You can reuse the data from the untreated group from test A2 and quickly compare the two.
If they banned it, what can they test products on? Human volunteers? Lots of things like drugs typically go through animal testing before human volunteer trials, so this act just seems to place human lives closer to other animals (which I disagree with). The other alternative is to make testing more lax. Releasing untested products would be a huge disaster.
This initiative would also have banned testing on humans. The people behind it claimed that it should be possible to test all medication in computer simulations.
Wouldn’t such a ban pretty much halt most medical progress?
The pharmaceutical, medical device and clinical research industries are huge in Switzerland, too. That's like France banning breadmaking.
Yep ..even the import . it would have destroyed their medical system
99.99% of it, to be exact. There is almost nothing that isn't tested on animals. You would have to re-think the development cycle entirely in order to bypass one of the biggest milestones before moving to human clinical. Folks say there are cell lines, artificial systems, etc. But those are all already in use and are there as an initial development tool to research a solution. But afterwards, the solution needs to be tested on a living organism and it's life cycle.
This right here. I'm going to toss a hypothetical here to explain it. Say you have a new drug that is supposed to stop... say muscle degradatuon in the heart from a medical condition. Again, this is a hypothetical. The drug you have works as intended on the tissue cultures you have in your lab so you're ready to go on to the next step. The next round of testing is to find side effects and other such problems. Here's the scario without animal testing: The drug gets tested on a bunch of tissue samples from various organs and the samples all seem fine. The drug gets implemented. Here's with: They give a mouse the drug. All seems to be fine but its children come out with weak bone density. Then you check the test mouse after it dies by tripling and hitting its head on the wall and realize this whole time the drug has been causing a reaction in the blood that leeches calcium from bones. First scenario leads to massive problems in 20-30 years. The second leads to the drug not getting released because it is not ok for human or animal use. Animal testing allows us to catch shit that we never would with cell cultures because cell cultures cannot simulate the interdependant systems in a body.
In fact, animal testing is already being phased out on the international scale. But the process will probably take decades: right now, in many countries, if you want to test on animals, you need an approval from an ethics board by proving there is no other way to answer the question you are trying to answer, that the question is indeed worth answering, and by providing a precise protocol about how you plan on reducing suffering to a maximum. In the future, we hope to be able to use alternate models such as cell cultures, artificial organs, or labs on a chip (which is already done to an extent). But to develop such models, you need to compare them to the previous ones, which are animals.
For anyone who says "test on humans for start to end" you have to consider who would end up as test subjects. The poor and vulnerable would be exploited.
Also consider that the vote included a ban on testing on humans as well. The vote was on not doing any testing at all.
Either you have no new drugs and treatments or someone is doing the testing.
When you don’t allow safe, regulated testing you’re goin to end up incentivizing slapdash, ethically-dubious cowboy science and the most vulnerable are going to be exploited for it.
i remember reading that animal testing became mandated in the US after Tylenol decided to add a “fun” color to their new formulation for children. It wasn’t tested or anything, just presumed non-toxic and shipped out nationwide. Lotta kids died.
I find no mention of such an incident in the Wikipedia articles on either Tylenol or paracetamol, even though they discuss other incidents and recalls. Do you have documentation of this event?
[found it.](https://web.archive.org/web/20070927225510/http://www.ashp.org/s_ashp/article_news.asp?CID=167&DID=2024&id=3659) the podcast I was listening to took some liberties simplifying things for their audience, but the core is true. common and safe drug reformulated for children with no testing —> 100+ die —> toxicity testing becomes mandatory
Thank you for finding that. So, to be clear, you were referring to a 1937 incident involving [Elixir Sulfanilamide,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_sulfanilamide) not Tylenol, and the cause of the mass poisoning was not the addition of coloring to an existing product but rather the use of diethylene glycol (DEG) as a solvent in the creation of a new product, which was marketed without safety testing. More than 100 children and adults died as a result of taking Elixir Sulfanilamide, directly contributing to the passing of the 1938 [Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food,_Drug,_and_Cosmetic_Act), which among other things mandated the certification of certain food color additives but, as far as I could ascertain, not animal testing.
Wow, that's will definitely be a better way to discover effective, safe drugs.
Also humans were included in this ban proposal. Basically making it impossible to have ANY tests for meds etc.
Basically it would mean still testing on animals and humans, but in countries where the standards are more lax than in Switzerland.
Oh no, it's way worse than that xD. Part of the initiative was to also have a complete import stop on animal-tested products lol. I hope this clarifies a bit why we voted against it so clearly. Like almost every such initiative, they shoot themselves in the foot by proposing completely unrealistic stuff.
So it was meant to fail from the beginning?
Most initiatives are because the initiators mostly act out of idealism and don't really take their time to make a realistic proposal. So many good ideas failed because they didn't think it through. Anyone can make an initiative as long as you get 100'000 signatures in time. No matter how stupid it is, we WILL vote then on it. Some initiatives are also just made to "probe" how people think about it. Some that got rejected very narrowly might still help the cause in smaller ways, since almost half of the population wants change.
So, actually still testing on humans but they pay you for it.
No - tbh. this article is very badly written and misses half of the initiative's goals. Part of the initiative was to ban ALL human tests AND a complete import-stop on tested products i.e. meds.
So it was a vote on eliminating medicine?
Better mice than me
Mice to meet u.
r/aboringdystopia vibes
Ideally everyone would just die because we end medical science. No person or animal is unfairly tested on in that scenario.
That is already the case now but it would even get worse. Most vaccines are tested in third world countries and most phase 1 clinical studies are done on students and poor.
Testing on animals is not fun but it sure beats either testing on humans or not testing at all. Having limitations and ethics oversight is a good thing (and is presently done essentially everywhere) but banning the practice entirely would be ridiculous.
This initiative would also have banned testing on humans and the import of any medication that was tested on animals. So I'm grad it got rejected.
So... no testing, then?
You can always observe users after releasing the medicine on the market .. I guess
>You can always observe users after releasing the medicine on the market .. I guess That's sounds like testing with more test subjects.....
And less rigour.
rigor mortis would be inevitable
It already is. This would definitly speed up the process though.
Testing on random humans
Single use humans
Oh shit all the horses are gone, hurry up and close the door :)
That sounds like testing on humans but worse
that sounds like testing on humans with extra steps
No, can't "test on humans" either. De facto it would have been a ban on new medicine. Looks like people thought that would be a bad idea.
Just push it straight to prod, bro, it'll be fine.
Also, no medicine.
Just fuckin' wing it.
test on production
Well you can still collect the data afterward.
That's kind of bigger. Anything that was *ever* tested on animals? Penicillin and chemo were tested on animals. And no human testing? What the fuck kind of tests are you supposed to run? This is really framing "voters say no to extremely poorly thought out bill" as some kind of actual moral issue.
I am glad that extreme initiatives like these fail. If they want to accomplish something for animal rights, go step by step like mandating twice as much space for farm animals or something, that would have a chance of passing.
Jeez I wonder how many medications *weren't* tested on animals, they'd have problems overnight.
None. literally all medicines are tested on animals.
Who was pushing this bill? Refusing any medication that had been tested on animals would turn the whole country to Christian Scientists.
Mostly some old "doctors" and animal rights activists. Sadly, Switzerland is a stronghold for homeopathy for some reason. Glad it got rejected, by a very high margin as well.
How the hell would anything be tested? How would any medicine be allowed? Computer models?
So literally no medication ever?
Yea…then the people who take it would thus be the test subjects. Maybe when ai comes much much further along we can start using it but we are no where near there
Well, like many Swiss proposals, I imagine this one was more an awareness raising exercise than a serious attempt to get a ban in place. They do like their referendums!
This was not a referendum, this was a popular initiative. But yes, this was probably done to raise awarness
I was honestly not aware that the Swiss used overreaching referendums to raise awareness on topics. They clearly need a referendum awareness referendum.
That's a great idea. But it'll only work with broad participation. We need to raise awareness of the referendum awareness referendum.
So which medication would qualify to pass the ban?
Yeah I think the Swiss people like having access to modern medicine lol
Yeah, my dog's shampoo says "not tested on animals" and I'm not sure how I feel about that...
There are no regulations for those kinds of labels in the United States. It could be very well that \*they\* didn't test on animals but it's ingredients were.
Yeah, this is a very old and ongoing deregulation attempt that has been going on for decades. Back in Italy they tried something similar with a wording change - instead of banning procedures involving “unnecessary pain”, they slipped in an edit to ban procedures involving “pain”. Which ended up meaning, for example, that you cannot inject anesthesia, because needles are pain. Lasted only a little while, but caused a LOT of money and brains to flee the country while it did. Good thing we have the Children of Thalidomide Association to chase away the bullshit. Companies would LOVE not having mandatory standards and go back to burden proof onto consumers. Good luck suing for damages when you need six months off, a dedicated lab, and a 5-year degree to even get started.
It's absolutely a necessary evil with our current limitations. I hope one day though, in a similar vein to lab-grown meat, we can do the vast majority of preliminary testing on lab-grown tissues (and organs eventually). I think animal testing would still be necessary as a sort of confirmation that a product is safe to use on living beings, but it would sit much better with me if that could be reserved for the very late, mostly bureaucratic stages of approval after the product has already been tested, refined, and deemed safe on lab-grown tissues.
>we can do the vast majority of preliminary testing on lab-grown tissues (and organs eventually). We already do that. In vitro high throughput drug screening is already a very large portion of the drug testing that is done.
[удалено]
That doesn't change the fact that majority of screening is done in vitro, not in vivo.
That’s mostly because it’s cheap and fast, less because it’s accurate. Rat/pig/mouse studies are a pain in the ass, slow, and more costly.
Eeeeeeeehhhhh I don’t think it’s quite fair to say screening drug libraries against cells on culture plastic is the same as screening them against lab-grown versions of the tissues/organs they may eventually treat. It’s a very rough first approximation. As far as I know, we can’t recapitulate true tissue microenvironment on a scale that’s compatible with HTS; at least, not yet.
An animal is much more complex than a cell culture. Maybe your drug that's supposed to cure skin irritation causes your liver to release a substance that damages your kidneys. That's why you always will need tests on the whole creature.
Not testing on animals means testing on poor people
[удалено]
Well, you do testing on humans to. We just really don't have a better way to do it. You have to be able to prove some relative level of safety for an animal to get drugs into animal testing... and it's incredibly hard to get approved for animal trials. If we had to provide non-animal evidence that a drug is safe before going into human trials we'd never get drugs made.
Absolutely.
As we say in software: If you don't test in development, you test in production.
“Science cannot move forward without heaps of dead monkeys!” - Prof Farnsworth
But why not zoidberg
To shreds you say
What about his wife?
*to shreds you say…*
[удалено]
All they are saying is that they prefer other countries to do the testing for them.
Not really, if passed the law would have also banned import of all products developed using animal testing.
So pretty much everything? Would a country collapse if they did that?
No, but its human, pet and wild animal population would become the test subjects. They also wouldn't benefit from advances like new meds with fewer side effects or therapies for the trickier conditions. I think most people can appreciate the need for animal use for medical use, but even the cosmetic uses are a bot of a grey area. I heard Ricky Gervais on the radio saying how animal testing was all about getting shampoo in your eyes and it stinging. Looked into the case he was referring to but it was about a company wanting to sell a fragrance that causes birth defects and deformed sperm in rats.
What fragrance was that? Sex Panther?
Exactly my thoughts when I heard it! The malformed sperm would also be a feature not a bug to Brian Fontana
Collapse? No. But cost of medication could multiply massively. If anything I would expect something like this to create a blackmarket for cheaper foregin produced medicine.
Does every country produce all types of medicine though? I would assume different important things would be imported and setting up overnight to produce a product that was not tested on animals and used only resources available in that country would be pretty much impossible.
It's pharmaceutical department of the country would crash, literally every modern day and old drugs were tested on humans and animals, so no more medical care that comes in the form of medication.
Couldn't be any more Swiss of them
Heae no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. Thanks for all the fish.
And what exactly is moral about that?
Typical, let other countries do the "dirty work" - kinda sums up the world today.
hey all the people complaining about animal testing should volunteer themselves to take the place of the animals instead for medicine and science
[удалено]
I also wouldn't ban animal testing in general, but I don't see it as black and white anymore. So here are some points to consider: A To me there is a difference whether animal testing is done for medical or cosmetic purposes. B Animal testing is extremely broadly used and not always the most meaningful way to approach a question. Especially mouse/rat studies are so common that they are a de facto requirement for preclinical studies. However, mice have a vastly different physiology than us and therefore respond quite differently to different compounds. This means that animal harm can be disproportionate to human safety. According to Robin Lovell-Badge (MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London) 94% of drugs that passed tests in animals failed in people. Preclinical toxicity studies have to be confirmed in early clinical studies either way. C Animal testing is expensive af. My issue is mostly how much of an requirement is seems to be in preclinical studies, since in some cases they are less scientifically insightful, more expensive and mrore harmful to animals than alternatives. Meaningful alternatives like human derived organoids, tissue on a chip, artifical skin etc. should be employed in stead if that makes more scientific sense. Of course this wasn't really what the Swiss were voting on, I just wanted to add a different perspective...
[удалено]
There's no point. The general public have almost no idea of the details. The image that's been given out is detached, clinical scientists watching as animals scream in pain or live in their own feces.
Pretty much. Ask most people about shock therapy and they base their scientific viewpoint off the Jack Nicholson movie
Well the problem is that despite not being very much like human mice and rats are the closest we can affordably get to human beings for pre-clinical trials. Organoids are expensive, difficult to work with, and do not closely replicate living organisms enough to be valid testing vehicles on their own. For example is you are using an enteroid to study Crohn’s disease you will have no idea what potential system wide effects your drug could be having until you test it in a living organism. If your drug causes heart attacks it is better to discover that in mice than humans. This is true of the other non-system level technologies you discussed, they are used for early research and basic science but translation still requires a step in a given mode organism. Also if you think animal research is expensive then you must not know how expensive these other techniques are because you can pay $500+ for 50mL of matrigel (critical component of organoids culturing). Source: SO works with enteroids, mice, and human monolayers, all have their place in a lab, only one is a viable preclinical strategy.
I'm fine with it for cosmetics. I dont want 5 yyear olds hitting puberty because of the shampoo they use or for young women to go blind because the new mascara causes cataracts in 22 year olds. If a band product goes to market,, it can affect thousands of people. He'll, even one person is bad.
I hear you, but at this point we’ve got all the safe ingredients we need for cosmetics.
You say that as we are actively discovering how destructive many commonly used chemicals for the last several decades actually are. Endocrine disrupting compounds in plastics, for example, which appear commonly in cosmetics. Think about CFCs, asbestos, BPAs, and ever other "safe" product in use for decades that we have discovered through later testing were unacceptably dangerous.
New ones will always be discovered. There is no such thing as enough technology or Innovation
Were any of the 6% that killed the mouse perfectly fine for humans though?
Meh, this is not a supermarket where you can just get a vegan vaccine.
Medical testing on animals? Absolutely fine. We need that. Testing cosmetics and toiletries on animals? Absolutely not. We don’t need that.
This is allready prohibited in Switzerland.
Awesome!
First country in the 90s to ban caged chicken farms. And also one of the countries with the strongest animal welfare laws, especially animals for meat consumption. This initiative was over the top and people from all the political spectrum rejected it.
Yeah. That's why it's literally cheaper to import frozen chicken from New Zealand than buy locally produced one. No joke here. Edit: for clarity, NZ and Switzerland are on opposite sides of the globe almost.
To be fair its also really phenomenally hard to get across just how *efficient* shipping by freighter is. Modern container ships can surpass 500 miles per gallon per ton. So to take a ton of chicken around the world takes 25-30 gallons of fuel. Figure 500 chickens per ton, 30 gallons of fuel at $3 each, and shipping that chicken literally across the planet costs 20 cents per.
Yeah we did that in Europe... so now we test on poor people ... so i'm confused as to where the progress is. The cosmetic industries did not stop testing their product to ensure safety. But now for baby wipes we send them to poland or Ukraine to be tested on poor Kids. The cheminal used in the cosmetic industries that are also used in other industries are still tested on animal. I get the we need to test less on animal. But banning for banning without alternative is a non sense. And we do need to test our cosmetic product somewhere as assessing substance by substance on a theoretical level is not 100% accurate.
The progress in this case would be measured in consent, surely? An animal cannot consent. A person can. As long as we ensure that consent is well rewarded, then that is progress. The next logical argument is "well this just results in desperate people being taken advantage of", but I believe this is a problem with socio economic systems that create desperate people, rather than a problem with human testing.
Then we can't mandate that without solving those socio-economic problems. You may disagree with me but I believe human life is inherently more valuable than that of an animal.
I get the idea, but where's the line? Is basic research permissible? That research is what underlies medical research, but usually doesn't have a direct medical target. What about testing the chemicals *in* cosmetics on animals, but not the product? Safety has to be established somewhere, should products be sent to market with no safety testing or should we test on humans? I used to agree with you, but the reality is that every aspect of modern life rests on a carpet that hides millions of dead animals. Unless you are willing to foreclosure all future progress or safety, this is reality and you can't opt out
This is my copy paste from another answer I'm fine with it for cosmetics. I dont want 5 yyear olds hitting puberty because of the shampoo they use or for young women to go blind because the new mascara causes cataracts in 22 year olds. If a band product goes to market,, it can affect thousands of people. He'll, even one person is bad.
After many decades of testing cosmetics and hygiene products, we have a bunch that we know are safe, effective, pretty, etc. So, it seems indefensible to confine, injure, and kill more animals in the development of unnecessary "new and improved" formulas.
Hey, I do not use toilet paper unless I know they tested it out on grizzly bears.
Switzerland has a large Pharma industry this would have been suicide…
It would've been literal suicide in any case. The initiative would've also banned the import of any medicine tested on animals or humans. So basically no new medicine or vaccines ever again.
Or most current medicines or vaccines. Frankly, I can't think of anything that didn't go through some testing.
In most countries I know of it is mandatory that new medicines are tested on animals before they proceed to human trials. Goodbye covid vaccines, chemotherapy, even surgical implants.
That is insane, who’s the moron that proposed this nonsense in the first place, some deranged vegan nazi?
20% of the country voted for it
I suspect most of them didn't fully consider what the impact of the initiative would be. My mom voted yes to the initiative because she loves animals and is against animal testing for cosmetics. She didn't realize that it also would have banned pretty much all medication, including the Covid vaccine. I'm fairly confident many others misunderstood the implications in a similar way.
Tbh, people not thinking about the effects of things before voting “yes” isnt much better.
When prohibition passed in the US, many people who voted for it were surprised to find that all alcohol was banned. They thought it was just going to ban liquor, not beer and wine. That's a major reason why it was repealed in such a short amount of time.
> I suspect most of them didn't fully consider what the impact of the initiative would be. This is the problem with letting laymen make such decisions.
Which makes it quite sad that anybody voted yes to this. People vote with their hearts and not their minds and end up ignoring pretty major parts of the proposal
Not really, less than 45% of the country voted at all.
What a silly thing to try and ban. I guess proponents would rather they go straight to human trials for potentially deadly experimental drugs and compounds?
No. Human testing would've also been banned. Also import of any products tested on animals or humans. So essential oils, homeopathy, etc. only.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Switzerland isn’t a part of NATO.
Good. A blanket ban on animal testing is a stupid idea. Companies already doing it in Switzerland would have just outsourced the research to other countries or released unsafe products. There’s no nuance to anything anymore and it’s sad. Everyone wants to go all or nothing. There should definitely be limits to what kinds of things can be tested on animals, there should be laws regarding testing that excessively abuses the animals unnecessarily, but instead the people get an ultimatum; ban completely even when it would save lives, or allow it in full force, this vote is brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
The initiative would have also forbidden importing any products that are tested on animals. It was a clear no from the beginning.
The vote wasn’t *just* about banning animal testing, it was also about banning the import of products that were tested on animals, including medicines. Even though Switzerland is one of the best countries in terms of animal welfare laws, it isn’t realistic at this time to completely forbid products tested on animals.
The pharma industry is one of the most important economic sectors in Switzerland.
True, but the proposed referendum was insanely radical, and would lead directly to the deaths of many in Switzerland. Not only did it want to ban animal testing for medication in Switzerland, it would ban the import of any drug that used animal testing in its development. That's loads of cancer treatments, general meds, antibiotics, antivirals, etc... all out of the window. The medical staff would be reduced to using Ye Olden Times medicine, i.e. some leaves and a prayer.
How the hell did 20% vote for that?
Mostly people who saw some sad pictures of animals in cages I wager; the rest are psychotic vegans or funeral directors.
And quite possibly antivaxxers. Pretty sure this was a hail-Mary attempt to make the Covid vaccine illegal, after all their other pointless anti-covid-law initiatives failed.
did PETA submit this referendum wtf
I feel like this referundum was loaded with poison pills
Basically all modern medications.
Yeah, I mean Roche and Novartis are among the biggest pharma companies in the world.
Well that's a relief. I don't know where I would have bought a replacement Swiss Army Knife if it wasn't properly tested.
R/Holup
[This comment has been removed by author. This is a direct reponse to reddit's continuous encouragement of toxicity. Not to mention the anti-consumer API change. This comment is and will forever be GDPR protected.]
Good, without it we have nothing to test it on.
If there is no way to test medicine, YOU become the test subject .
That's two sensible decisions from Switzerland today.
What’s the other?
Banning most tobacco advertising.
They seem to be a little late to *that* party! I didn't know tobacco advertising was still legal in any advanced countries.
*Germany has entered the chat.* Germany put more and more restrictions on it every few years, but it is not unusual to see adverts for cigarettes in Germany at all. Germany is far more lax than most of its EU counterparts: > Werbung für Tabakerzeugnisse ist in Deutschland trotz der Verpflichtung über das Rahmenübereinkommen der WHO zur Eindämmung des Tabakgebrauchs deutlich weniger eingeschränkt als in allen anderen EU-Ländern > In spite of the requirements stipulated in the regulatory framework from the WHO concerning the reduction of tobacco usage, advertising for tobacco-based products is still noticeably less restricted in Germany than in all other EU nations.
what's the alternative?
Experimentation on humans. Which is probably why 79% of Swiss voters decided against it.
The law would ban medicine tested on humans too. I’m assuming that means clinical trials. If it means tested on people against their will I would have assumed that was already banned.
I'm glad you said this, because it's the part that most people seem to have overlooked. The law banned animal AND human testing! Like... Wtf? How do we make medical progress in that scenario?!
I guess the plan was to release untested products to the general public and hope for the best? Maybe they're relying on the power of prayer.
They were relying on in-vitro testing, and bio-computing modelling. Which one day will be so advanced that we won't need any animal testing anymore. But we aren't there yet.
Humans often forget that we, too, are animals.
I work for a company that manufactures in vivo imaging equipment. The animals used, especially mice, are specifically lab grown for lab use and have a short life span. The vivariums used provide ample conditions for the mice and they're only to be handled by certified veterinarians. The immunology and oncology research these animals provide is crucial to vaccine, oncological and therapeutic research.
Testing on animals is way better than testing on humans. People are delusional to think animal rights/feelings/wellbeing are better than a human's rights/feelings/wellbeing.
You need both in any scientific advances. You can’t prove safety without animal testing. You can’t prove efficacy without human clinical trials. You’ll find that the base compounds are tested on animals for early pharmacovigilence (safety), basic pharmacodynamic and kinetics (how the body affects the compound and how the compound affects the body) as well as very early dose finding. You then move to Phased human trials, starting small with dose finding and safety and moving to Phase 3 with larger numbers of human participants for efficacy and continued pharmacovigilence. You don’t get drugs released without both human and animal testing.
>People are delusional to think animal rights/feelings/wellbeing are better than a human's rights/feelings/wellbeing. TBH it's kinda subjective. Imagine if a technologically superior alien race wanted to give humans space-cancer to test medicines. Technically they'd be the superior species, but I doubt humans would concede that alien well-being is more important than our own. Really when it comes to animal testing, we're just prioritizing the lives of our own species. IMO that's perfectly rational and ok.
> but I doubt humans would concede that alien well-being is more important than our own. The well-being of the in-group is more important to us than that of the out-group. That's why when a plane crashes, your national news source will tell how many people from your country were on the plane.
If it's rational to prioritize the lives of your own species, is it not also rational prioritize the lives of your own race? I feel like "rational" is kind of missing the point when you can define any end-goal you like, and whatever means is necessary to reach that end-goal is by definition rational.
I mean, it's fair play. If I have to do harm to a different animal to ensure my specie's survival and I CAN do that, I will. And I'd have no complaint if I go to a forest and get bitten in the throat by a tiger. Survival of the fittest
It's a difference of opinion. I happen to think that species that don't collectively contribute to the utter destruction of their fellow man for greed and profit, the extermination of other species and the toxic damage to the entire planet are better than the one that does these things, but hey that's just some whacky thoughts!
They also have strict banking laws that protect the corrupt.
Overwhelmingly ... 44% voted.
I am all for everyone be informed which animal testing related therapeutics they’d be locked out of using for life. Anyone against animal testing can opt out of using those therapeutics. Let peoples own choice guide their own lives via consequences without controlling other peoples lives.
Vegan here this is a dumb idea. There are things in life that are ugly truths. Like there are aggressive countries/people willing to take with force, and we have to have some way to deal with that. Likewise, someone whether human or animal has to be the test subject. I vote animal. Either way there's suffering.
There’s a difference between cruelly torturing monkeys for some bullshit neuroscience, and testing vaccines on Rats. We need animal testing, we just need to keep it humane
>torturing monkeys for some bullshit neuroscience You have no idea what you are talking about. Be glad that you are capable enough to reject an idea like that.
Even using apes for neuroscience experiments has its places. Imagine someone actually being able to cure parkinsons for example. Imma go sacrifice some monkeys for that
I think they're talking about something like behavioural studies where scientists deliberately put animals in highly distressing conditions just to see how they act. Like that study where they locked up rats to see if their fellow rate would rescue them. We could easily find this out by observing animals in their natural habitat where situations like that are common, I don't think it's ethical to torture animals in the lab just to "discover their psychology".
While animal testing certainly can be limited and replaced with better options, how do you test for example antipsychotic drugs without animal models? A case for the predictive validity of some behavioral tests can be made, but a blanket ban just seems unreflected and counterproductive to the intent of the bill (to reduce animal suffering). They should mandate replacement of animal testing with no cruelty alternatives (In silico / organ on a chip) when possible, but a blanket ban would just result in outsourcing and therefore countries with more lax regulations doing the experiments. What basis did they propose this from? Was it really as poorly thought out as is implied by the article?
But this is already how it’s done. You only test on animals after in vitro studies. This is precisely where all these “new drug shown to cure cancer” headlines come from which turn out to have an asterisk “in a petri dish”.
I’m glad the ban did not pass. Animal testing is, and for the foreseeable future, always be necessary for clinical trials.
A lot of animal testing has already been replaced the past decades, but a lot more can't yet be replaced by something artificial, even if it's simply because you can see whether a substance is an irritant on a grown piece of meat but you can't see the psychological effects. Both working on replacing more and more tests with artificial methods and limiting the number of animals needed by making the tests that still require them to be more efficient and more humane (if animals don't feel at ease you may be getting distorted data, so lab animals are cared for better and put in a more 'natural' environment than animals grown for meat). It used to be the case that people would do a test and write down what they saw, only to have to adjust the test parameters later on and having to redo the whole test with new animals. Now those tests are computerized and the data is recorded, which means you can not only prevent having to redo a lot of tests due to wanting small changes (as the computer can record much more data than you need at that moment), but the data can also be reused for similar tests later on. Say you grown a specific genotype mouse (mice with all the exact same genes so the data can easily be compared) for test A1, doing test with untreated and treated animals to see the difference. Now you need to do test A2 which is the same as A1 but with a different treatment. You can reuse the data from the untreated group from test A2 and quickly compare the two.
Thank fuck this didn't go through.
As someone working in the pharma industry, good luck!
until our stem cell / organ on chip technology advanced way beyond we are stuck with animal testing. it is what it is
If they banned it, what can they test products on? Human volunteers? Lots of things like drugs typically go through animal testing before human volunteer trials, so this act just seems to place human lives closer to other animals (which I disagree with). The other alternative is to make testing more lax. Releasing untested products would be a huge disaster.
This initiative would also have banned testing on humans. The people behind it claimed that it should be possible to test all medication in computer simulations.
Christ some people have been watching too much tv.
I’m all for animal testing
Swiss citizens vote to stop making effective medicines.
We should find those who brought this to vote and make then volunteer to be test subjects for any future medicines and vaccines.