[JohnW]

I don't doubt that Expat is correct when he says that not all animal testing brings consistent results when applied to humans. However, sometimes the opposite is true also. I would like to give one example which I only learned last night watching '60 minutes' on television. A Dr. in Canada was very upset watching young babies die because they could not find necessary hearts of the right size and blood type to transplant in order to save their lives. She then remembered that, when testing transplants on VERY YOUNG mice early in her career, that the transplanting of hearts with a different blood type seemed to work because the imune system of the mice was not yet mature and so did not identify the new heart as foreign tissue. She had a patient a few months old who was going to die anyway, so she transplanted a heart of the correct size but a different blood type. The heart was not rejected and that child is now seven years old and doing very well. More babies under one year old are now having heart transplants which do not match as far as blood type is concerned and the surgeries have so far been successful. It has also been discovered since, that these children can now accept blood transfusions of differing types of blood to their own. I too believe that animals should not be made to suffer needlessly but I do think that medical testing on animals can be a good indicator and provide valuable information. They've been doing it for a very long time. I'm sure that if it was valueless they would have given it up by now.