CIVIS Foundation Report 8, Winter 1989/1990 (Part One)

 

 

THE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF DOCTORS AGAINST VIVISECTION OF NOVEMBER 8, 1989 AT THE ITALIAN PARLIAMENT

 

 

"VIVISECTION OR SCIENCE A CHOICE TO MAKE"

 

Since the beginning of 1989, a coalition of Italian Anti-Vivisection groups led by the Fondazione Imperatrice Nuda and under the aegis of our CIVIS, had to overcome numerous, in part quite unexpected obstacles before our first International Congress of Doctors for the Abolition of Vivisection could at long last take place in the Hall of Parliamentary Groups at Montecitorio, the Italian Parliament. The opposite column and the next page show the program of the event, perfectly prepared in all its details by Roman architect Signora Fabrizia Pratesi, under the CIVIS patronage, and titled for Prof. Pietro Croce's trailblazing scientific treatise: VIVISECTION OR SCIENCE - A CHOICE TO MAKE.

 

As told in our CIVIS Bulletin Nr 2, published on Christmas 1987, shortly before ILDAV was founded, already in November 1984 the Italian Parliament had been persuaded by Congressman Filippo Fiandrotti, with the help of our CIVIS literature and videos, to vote with a clear majority for a motion requesting the government to prohibit all animal experiments for a probatory three-year period to start with, in view of a speedy replacement of all animal experimentation.

 

As a consequence of that vote, five different bills have been introduced, four aimed at drastically curtailing vivisection, and one, the Fiandrotti bill, at abolishing it altogether. This last one is, of course, the only one that CIVIS can endorse. The purpose of our last November 8th congress was to remind the politicians of their duties, providing them with further information and organizing round-table discussions with MPs and members of the media before the bills come under study.

 

Abstracts from the speeches of the participating MDs follow below. Our readers will be familiar with most names, from our CIVIS Foundation Reports of previous ILDAV meetings.

 

Prof. Dr. Bruno Fedi, MD, anatomical-pathologist, having specialized in urology, gynecology, cancerology, lecturer certified at Rome University, Head of the Civic Hospital of Terni, Italy: "The title of this Congress bestows on us the task to demonstrate that vivisection is not scientifically valid; that a concept which has universally been accepted as apparently exact, is false. We can't now examine all the motives for vivisection. We must limit ourselves to the scientific aspect, so that public opinion and the best representatives of our citizenry may learn the facts and promote laws that will advance scientific progress, for the benefit of everybody, and not only of certain lobbies or industries. The proofs against the validity of vivisection are:

 

1) Genetic proofs: no animal has an identical number of genies and the relationship between them as has man.

 

2) Pharmacological proofs: 70% of the more than 20,000 drugs produced have been withdrawn because of side-effects [that had not been observed in animals].

 

3) Surgical proofs: commonly employed surgical techniques, according to a great number of leading surgeons of the past and present and also my personal experience, have been learned and perfected through the experience with man (prostatecnomy, vasectomy, hysterectomy, cistectomy etc.)

 

4) Anatomist-pathological proofs: the link between smoking and cancer, between alcohol. and cirrhosis of the liver, between diet and artheriosclerosis, and many other observations, have all been discovered through man.

 

5) Epidemiological and statistical proofs: they have all been obtained through man.

 

6) Proofs deriving from practical observation: the effect of anabolising substances on athletes, the effect of Periactin, of Thalidomide, of Paraquat etc. have all been done on man.

 

7) Basic discoveries for today's medicine (X-Rays etc.) were done without the use of animals.

 

"Why then does the vivisectionist method continue? Not for scientific reasons, but for legal and for economic reasons. Vested interests are creating a drug-dependent society. The political parties cannot allow the present scientific anarchy to continue. The Members of Parliament should be concerned with unsound medical practice and therefore may not allow vivisection to continue. We are not against science, but against bad science."

 

Prof. Pietro Croce, MD, lecturer certified at Milan University, Italy, member of the College of American Pathologists, long-time researcher at the L. Sacco Hospital of Milan, in the USA and Spain: "There are two or more solutions to every problem, and the obvious solution is often the most erroneous. Science is not a dogma. On the contrary. It must be debatable, it must always be conscious of its own fallaciousness, otherwise it degenerates into scientism. And this has happened to modern medicine, which has become a religion. But science is not a dogma, on the contrary. To remain alive it must be accompanied by continuous confutation, step by step, until the moment arrives for total confutation, for a "great passage". In medicine, the moment for such a passage has now come. The basis of our thought is the following: no animal can be an experimental model for any other species. Great tragedies have occurred because this self-evident truth has been ignored. We don't even have to recall all those many tragedies. Suffice it to mention that in a span of just three years, between 1984 and 1987, 14,836 toxic effects from medicines have been revealed and the health authorities have been obliged to withdraw from the market 22,621 drug combinations.

 

"We refuse to concede that animal experiments have been useful to medical science "at least in the past", as our adversaries would like us to admit, in order not to concede total defeat. We remain steadfast in our affirmation that a methodological error remains always an error, from the day of its birth until it passes away. Some results obtained with animals and human beings have coincided. That's inevitable. But then it's always been just that: a coincidence, ascertainable after the fact only."

 

Dr. Wemer Hartinger, MD, surgeon in West-Germany with specialization in traumatic surgery: "If the maladies continue to increase in spite of sacrifice of billions of laboratory animals, then it is obvious that the methodology employed on animals by medical research is erroneous. All our knowledge on the reactivity of the human organism derives from the experiences made with man and not from what we learned with experiments done on animals. Also the lawmaker shares this opinion; in fact, to be licensed for marketing, each drug or therapy must be preventively tested in clinical studies made on humans, regardless of the results obtained in previous animal tests More than 1600 chemical substances have been licensed for use in the alimentary industries. An equal number for cosmetics and about as many for household products. Furthermore, a practically unlimited number is permitted for pharmaceutical products. All these substances end up without any control in our organism, and nothing is known of their cumulative effect.

 

"It is interesting that many of those substances, which animal tests have revealed to be toxic - such as formaldehyde, dioxin, asbestos and many others - are still allowed to be marketed under the pretext that animal tests mean nothing! There are only two reasons for sustaining the necessity of animal experimentation: either one is not sufficiently informed about it, or else one profits by it."

 

Louis Bon De Brouwer, MD, noted researcher and medical author, France: "Nowadays the media talk a lot about pollution of the planet. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Why don't they include the most dangerous form of pollution - medical drugs? Anti-hypertension drugs cause enduring damage and allergic reactions, not found in laboratory animals. At least one third of patients suffer side-effects, including cardio-vascular. failure...

 

"The pharmaceutical industry controls governments by their contributions to their political campaigns. Vivisection is a legal system which allows the pharmaceutical companies to market harmful products. It is an unscientific practice and should be outlawed, but this is prevented by financial interests, largely Swiss banks. Banks and the pharmaceutical industry dominate Switzerland...

 

"Apart from the differences between the various species, individuals vary within the same species. Patients are the victims of pollution by the pharmaceutical laboratories. Drugs produce almost as many victims as pesticides, which are used without control, causing food pollution. No wonder there is increasing disease throughout the world. We are all victims of general pollution. We are all at the mercy of politicians and the pharmaceutical industry."

 

Gerhard Buchwald, MD, Director of the Park-Sanatorium of Bad-Steben, West Germany, witness in more than 150 court trials about vaccination damages: "Vaccines have never had the proclaimed preventive effect on infections. The regression of infectious diseases started over 200 years ago, which means long before the introduction of vaccination, and it was due to the improved social conditions of the population: nutrition and hygiene.

 

"Contrarily to general belief, the vaccinations have had a negative influence on the decrease of the infective maladies and mortality. Statistics started off at a period when the infectious diseases were already on the downgrade.

 

"Careful studies over a period of many years have revealed that each introduction of a mass vaccination has obtained only one result: the immediate recrudescence of the malady that the vaccine should have prevented, but which it has solicited instead. The temporary but immediate isolation of infected patients has each time proved sufficient to prevent an epidemy.

 

"After every flare-up of an infection due to vaccination, the maladies have resumed the downward course which existed already before the vaccination. In general and over a period of many years, every vaccination has caused more casualties than the infection it was supposed to prevent. This happened for instance with the smallpox vaccination in Germany and many other countries. Vaccines don't protect, but do harm. A scientific proof of their usefulness has never existed, whereas the severe, sometimes fatal damages they cause are a proven fact."

 

Hans Ruesch, author and medical historian. "I haven't prepared a paper to read, because I first wanted to hear what the other speakers would say. In fact I heard that various bills on vivisection are at present under study, of which four are regulationist and one abolitionist. I can assure you that any kind of regulation is totally useless, so we shouldn't waste the time of MPs and the money of taxpayers discussing it.

 

"The strictest regulatory law ever designed to curb vivisection was enacted in Great Britain in 1876, when the animal experiments numbered about 300 a year. Under this strict law, the experiments rose year after year, until they reached the macabre total of five and a half million, at least 85 percent of them performed without anesthesia.

 

"Our adversaries deride these figures, affirming that many experiments are done without anesthesia because they imply a mere pinprick. But that's misleading, because the purpose of most pinpricks is to inflict some mortal malady to the animal, a sacrifice that is furthermore totally useless, because it is impossible to transmit to an animal a human malady. This is a hard biological fact. And for this reason it is impossible to learn from an animal how to cure human maladies. So if we want to waste time with idle discussions, let's talk about regulations. But if we really want to change something in order to improve not only the fate of animals but especially of humans, by reforming modern medicine, then let's talk abolition.

 

"I've heard it said that the Italian law, which dates from 1931, is the worst. I've also heard it said that in some countries there are some very good legislations. But all those laws are equally bad because they affirm the usefulness of vivisection, that doesn't exist. The moment you admit that vivisection is useful for man, there can be no restraint, no limit to it.

 

"Here all look up to England and America as examples to follow, but as far as vivisection is concerned these two countries are by far the worst in the world - where the infiltration by our adversaries has reached perfection. Especially Britain, where the entire anti-vivisectionist movement is directed by the Vivisection Syndicate. Three years ago a new bill was enacted in Great Britain, which is even worse than the old one.  More and more experiments need no longer be reported, and at the same time vivisection is being introduced into the so-called undeveloped countries, meaning the as yet unexploited countries.

 

"A while ago in the lobby, a lady challenged me to denounce the journalists for their silence, to blame them for not spreading more information about vivisection. But she was wrong. Most of the Italian public knows what happened to my book when it came out in 1976. The journalists spread it all over the country as no other book before. They did what they felt like doing. But within a few weeks the book was withdrawn by its own publisher, the Rizzoli publishing empire, which was owned, and still is, by Montedison, the chemical multinational.

 

"We can blame the press, but not the journalists. Their services for our cause can only be sporadic, a flash in the pan. They are on a payroll, and so they must obey the boss. For some time now Italy's principal daily, Corriere della Sera, and its popular subsidiaries, are propagandizing the obscene head-transplant experiments of the American Doctor Robert White, as if they were not useless, but as if they had even moral merit, and show pictures of the doctor receiving the accolade from the Pope for his achievement. What's the purpose of this? To desensitise the public, which must gradually get used to this kind of scenes, and to accept them sheepishly as "Science".

 

"However, as Prof. Croce has illustrated, all this is not Science, but "scientism" - a degeneration of Science, a malformed offspring of it, born in France more than. a century ago, which made our self-styled scientists believe that if we infect animals with AIDS - which can't be done - then we can learn from them how to cure humans of AIDS, which can't be done either.

 

"Speaking of AIDS: it was created in the animal laboratories by the incompetence of the pseudo-scientists who direct "modem medicine". This view was officially voiced for the first time by Russia's news broadcasts in 1985, and of course previously by CIVIS medical experts like Dr. Gustave Mathieu of France. They have meanwhile become so numerous that the question as to whether AIDS was born in the animal laboratories or not is no longer a moot point. It was."

 

Peter Mansfield, MB, B.Chir. (Cantab.), Great Britain. "For at least twenty years now doctors in Britain have been gradually losing the respect and trust of ordinary people. More and more people are turning to whole food and health shops for the means to maintain their health, or consulting practitioners of alternative medicine for their ailments in spite of their much more modest training and resources as compared with hospitals and medical clinics. This trend in favor of alternative medicine is even more impressive since in Britain the patient must pay the full price for it, whereas he receives conventional medicine virtually free of charge. This decline in popularity follows a period in which medicine became more and more firmly based on technical and scientific principles and equipment, less and less on the caring attention of a known personal doctor....

 

"Unfortunately, all treatments of this kind contradict the laws of biology with unpredictable consequences. So many patients have experienced disappointment, adverse effects or complications from vaccines, drugs, surgery, or radiation that the industries sponsoring these treatments have been forced to adopt stringent testing procedures, including animal experiments, prior to launching them for human use. Even with these safeguards, however, all chemical medicines remain potentially poisonous, especially in long-term use, and they seldom provide a genuine cure. As well as failing to satisfy the comparatively simple needs of the majority of patients, this increasingly high-risk approach to medicine has caused many tragic mistakes. New drugs are now usually more toxic and much more expensive than their predecessors. None of the natural methods advocated by medical Pioneers like Dr Max Bircher-Benner of Switzerland, Dr Samuel Hahnemann and Sebastian Kneipp of Germany, Dr Are Waerland of Finland and Dr Sir Robert McCarrison of Great Britain are a few samples from other countries of the genius underlying this rich heritage. None of these methods are inherently poisonous or unsafe. All of them have been developed entirely through direct observations on human volunteers, without animal experiments of any kind. They are eminently practical and inexpensive. They provide a comprehensive range of treatment possibilities.

 

"In one family medical practice, working against the tide of conventional opinion, natural treatments that are inherently safe and therefore require no animal experimentation, are also more popular, less expensive, and of much more practical use than pharmaceuticals.

 

"Any claim that animal experiments are essential for medical progress is considered by this author to have no foundation. On the contrary, no new treatments so unsafe as to require the questionable safeguard of animal experiments should be developed."

 

Bernhard Rambeck, MD, Director of the biochemical laboratory of the Institute for Research on Epilepsy of Bielefeld, West Germany. "We don't intend to abolish neither science nor medicine, because mankind needs them today more than ever before. But medical science has blundered into an impasse from which it has to get out. Medicine has become an administrator of symptoms, having forgotten what its role is: to prevent and cure diseases. The erroneous mechanistic concept of health has deviated research from the right road.

 

"Epilepsy artificially produced in an animal with mechanical and violent means is in no way comparable to human epilepsy, which arises from within, spontaneously, and has usually more than one cause, usually also including psychic reasons, which can't be reproduced in an animal. This explains why the various substances with which we can sedate or diminish epileptic attacks in animals - of course, after provoking them artificially - not only don't obtain similar results in man, but are on the contrary total failures. In spite of enormous investments in research, the promised breakthroughs have not been realized and there has been no significant progress wherever animal models have been employed.

 

"While we fiddle with animal brains, we forget every case is individual. More emphasis should be placed on teaching patients to reduce or interrupt seizures, and on diet and relaxation. Animal experiments also prevent us drawing conclusions from the spontaneous recoveries."

 

Arie Brecher, MD, head pediatrician in Holon, Israel: "The abolition of vivisection must be total. In a single year in the USA one and a half million people have been hospitalized because of side-effects of drugs, which have all been preventively tested on animals. Animals are comparatively different from humans and no animal species can serve as an experimental model for man. Each animal has a genetic code of its own, which is a fixed datum and characteristically unique in each species. For this reason, a method that is based on the similarity between the species, while there are differences, different genetic codes, can only lead medical science into error. The mouse, the dog, the monkey, even when they are placed into the same environment, don't contract the same maladies. There simply can be no medical progress based on animal tests.

 

"The general belief in their usefulness is the result of the brainwash conducted on public opinion for a long time. There are more than four hundred methods of medical research that do not require animals. But far more important than any research is prevention. And prevention is being practically ignored by the medical organisation because it costs little or nothing. We must change method and we must change the law. We must have abolition, and it has to be total."

 

Christoph Demand, Austrian Lawyer. "In Italy exists the possibility to do what the Austrian Parliament has not dared to do: to abolish vivisection and all animal experiments."

 

 

To Page Two