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What Would America be Like Without Animal Research
Discoveries Through Primate Models
From: 1999 Report of Progress, p.35 (Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research)
WHAT WOULD AMERICA BE LIKE WITHOUT ANIMAL RESEARCH?
- Polio would cripple thousands of unvaccinated children and adults this year.
- Most of the nation's one million insulin-dependent diabetic individuals
wouldn't be insulin dependent--they would be dead.
- 60 million Americans would risk death from heart attack,
stroke or kidney failure from lack of medication to control high blood
pressure.
- Doctors would have no chemotherapy to
save the 70 percent of children who now survive acute
lymphocytic leukemia.
- More than one million Americans would
lose vision in at least one eye this year because
cataract surgery would be impossible.
- Hundreds of thousands of people disabled
by strokes or by head or spinal cord injuries would not
benefit from rehabilitation techniques.
- The more than 100,000 people with arthritis who
each year receive hip replacements would walk only with
great pain and difficulty or be confined to wheelchairs.
- 7,500 newborns who contract jaundice each year
would develop cerebral palsy, now preventable through
phototherapy.
- There would be no kidney dialysis to
extend the lives of thousands of patients with end-stage
renal disease.
- Surgery of any type would be a
painful, rare procedure without the development of
modern anesthesia allowing artificially induced
unconsciousness or local or general insensitivity to pain.
- Instead of being eradicated, smallpox would
continue unchecked and many others would join the two
million people killed by the disease.
- Millions of dogs, cats, and other pets and farm
animals would have died from anthrax, distemper, canine
parvovirus, feline leukemia, rabies, and more than 200
other diseases now preventable because of animal research.
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