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