AR-News: Email Dept of Health

Mon May 3 20:55:35 EDT 2004

Courtesy of http://www.dlrm.org/

Link between illnesses and chemicals and the flawed method of testing 
chemicals (animal testing).

1. There is a significant rise in cancer starting shortly after World War 2 
and persisting into the 1990s.

2. The death rate due to all cancer, except lung cancer, in people between 
ages 40 and 45 years, increased six-fold between 1950 and 1980, lung cancer 
ten-fold.

3. Trends as impressive as these are found, for example, in allergies 
(asthma) especially in children, and dementia (Alzheimer¹s, Parkinson¹s, 
multiple sclerosis), which is increasingly afflicting people below their 
fifties. Autism in children soars at a breath-taking rate: according to 
official US data, the number of affected children increased ten-fold over 
the past 10 years and amounts to 120,000 in 2002 in this country (UK).

4. Since World War 2, some 80,000 man-made chemical substances, for various 
purposes, were brought on the market in varying quantities of up to 100,000 
tonnes a year. These chemicals are used for outdoor and domestic purposes, 
even finding their way onto our tables in the form of food additives and 
pesticides. This suggests a link between the adverse health trends and the 
concomitant introduction of chemicals.

5.According to the European Commission (EC), only 2% of these chemicals have 
been assessed for the risk they may cause¹ to rodents! In 2003, the EC 
issued the REACH project (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation of 
Chemicals) in which we should know by 2020 the risk of the 100,000 
chemicals¹ in rodents. Ninety two million animals would be involved.

6. Non-animal testing is reliable and very fast. They provide definitive 
results within hours, or days at most, valid for humans, while animal 
experimentation lasts for months and years and yield results valid for 
animals only.

7. Industrial parties seem uninterested in correctly testing chemicals. If 
they have their way we will have dangerous products infiltrating our homes 
and our food just because they were declared safe by flawed (animal) tests.

Please write to the Department of Health and D.E.F.R.A in the UK asking them 
to support non-animal testing of chemicals.

Emails:

dhmail at doh.gsi.gov.uk, Chemicals.Strategy at defra.gsi.gov.uk

++sample letter++

Dear Department of Health and Chemical Strategy at DEFRA,

I am writing about scientific toxicity assessment of chemicals in the REACH 
(Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) programme.

Europeans live surrounded by over 100,000 chemicals, 98% of which have never 
been tested for their effects on our health or the environment. The European 
Commission is right in deciding that these products must be assessed.

However many doctors and organisations, such as Doctors and Lawyers for 
Responsible Medicine (DLRM), challenge the EC's projected use of traditional 
toxicology methods in such assessments, since these would rely on 
animal-based tests, which have been conclusively proved to be unreliable for 
human medical research.

Examination of recent health data statistics prove that we are inadvertently 
exposed, inside and outside our homes, to a full-blown chemical war which 
claims hundreds of thousands of innocent victims yearly in the EU. The board 
of Alliance for Responsible Science (AFRS), in which DLRM participates, has 
worked out a Science Based Toxicology programme (SBT) for reliable toxic 
risk assessment which is valid for humans and enable us to forecast long 
term effects.

The methods proposed are derived from those of modern biology (DNA,chips, 
'reporter' genes etc). They are fast, allowing high throughput of screening 
of chemicals, can be easily robotized, and are cost-effective compared with 
traditional toxicology.

DLRM is campaigning for the adoption of this programme by the EC and EU. 
DLRM believe it could halve the cancer mortality rate over the next five 
years, and would address the wide variety of side effects which have been 
tested by invalid methods.

The DLRM programme offers significant health benefits and would consequently 
free up tax-payers money in the NHS fund.

I would be grateful if both DEFRA and the Department of Health would 
consider funding this exciting programme - the website of DLRM is 
http://www.dlrm.org

Thank you in advance for your help and I look forward to hearing from you 
shortly.

Yours sincerely,

Animal experiments have:
a 63% failure rate when detecting human carcinogens
a 75-95% failure rate for detecting drug side effects
a 70% failure rate for detecting drugs which cause birth defects
Success rates lower than those achieved by uneducated guesswork.

This is not science!!

Recommended website: The Absurdity of vivisection
http://vivisection-absurd.org.uk/

Information on animal research available free by EMail from 
vivisectionkills at hotmail.com

_________________________________________________________________
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the wild, cruel beast is not behind the bars of the cage. he is in front of it - axel munthe

"Never doubt that a small group of dedicated citizens can change the world. 
Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."      Margaret Mead
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