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II;' - D .eep inside the University of Sydney, in a small recess cannot be extrapolated to suit the situation of another of the Blackburn Buiilding, called the David Read species. This process is widely considered unscientific, of Laboratory, a dog is strapped to a table. high risk and dangerous in that it causes delays in treatments The room is dark in order not to waken the animal, and a or prevention of illnesses. In this and his two further texts, sign outside the curtained doorway tells passers-by to remain Naked Empress (1983), and 1000 Doctors Againsl silent as sleep studies are in progress. The dog is conneeted Vivisection (1989), he showed that human experimentation by 24 cords to a 'breathing monitor' (a motion monitor - such was an inevitability when we have an inappropriate screen devices are considered unreliable and cannot distinguish ling process for dangerous drugs, vaccines, surgical tech between respiration and heartbeat). It may even have been niques and other 'therapies'. This we have seen in the case of subjected to a tracheotomy or any other surgical operation, vaccines which have never been safely or effectively tested, as part of the study. and drugs such as thalidomide whrich caused more than 10,000 birth deformities, and mQrc recently, c1ioquinol, So what could this strange medieval scene mean? Could it which paralysed and blinded over 30,000 Japanese and many be some veterinarian's obscene voyeurism? For what ends is this study hoping to fulfil? Australians to varying degrees. Humans become the real 'guinea pigs' as the animal model is really just a legal scape Believe it or not, this is part of research into Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), a .hYm.ill1 disorder in which babies goat for drug companies who wish to pawn off their invari ably dangerous substances. die without any explanation. Dogs do .!lQ! in fact suffer SIDS (also known as Cot Death), but researchers at Sydney Let us go back to the dog at the University of Sydney. University believe that they can learn about the syndrome by This animal represents the fallacies of 25 years of fruitless studying canine sleep and breathing patterns. One Cot Death research. Where there is a large funding cam researcher there has been performing similar experiments for paign (like the National Red Nose Day Appeal), fallacious over 15 years in Australia and the USA - achieving no Ibut expensive research will be abundant. In this case there breakthroughs for human health in that time! are two stumbling blocks for achieving meaningful results. The story is the same for many fields of 'medical research'. The first is the most obvious. This is the wrong model to Other Ispecies are studied in order to find the causes or cures study human disease as it lacks our physiological/genetic for human disorders, or intricate biomedical research is make-up and it is removed from the context in which illness undertaken in a laboratory to discover the microscopic occurs. This is espeeially notable given that vaccination has anomalies of illness. Would it be safe to assume that most been implicated in cot death by independent researchers. It people feel that these research techniques have been respon· is unlikely that vaccinations played any part in the artificial sible for not only an understanding of dis-ease but also for contexts of the laboratory model. the development of cures for human illness? Perhaps it Animal histology ie. tissue makeup,physiology and bio would, but let us not discount those dissenting voices from chemistry are quite different to humans. therefore all ani the scientific community who actually challenge the useful mals differ in disease patterns, reactions to drugs and dietary ness of such research models. requirements. In 1978, Swiss medical historian Hans Ruesch released his Dr. Chris Seaton, researcher at the University of Sydney Oook Slaughter of the Innocent (CIVIS), an account of the said "we do a lot of animal research in sleep disorders. Most damages to human health which -are a result of pseudo-scien of it on dogs and cats but in the past on Gats and rabbits. A tific research; research which uses the incorrect model, the lot more in recent times our research is moving towards incorrect species for drug trials, for vaccine trials, for devel human models. One of the reasons for that is the fact that in oping surgical techniques and for studying the progress of the past even though we've found we can do some very disease. clever research, and at the end of many years of painslaking Ruesch showed that each specie-s is different from others research, although you have a lot of interesting results you in respect to genetic, physiological, metabolic and psycho cannot always apply it to humans. Application to humans is logical makeup, and that results obtained from one species sometimes very difficult and often impossible." 36·NEXUS OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1992