Europeans for Medical Progress is a non-profit organisation of scientists and medical professionals dedicated to improving patient safety.

Drug safety is a major health challenge facing us today. Adverse drug reactions are now the fourth leading cause of death in the western world. Clearly, our current testing procedure requires urgent attention.

New drugs are tested for safety on animals before they can be administered to humans. But are animal tests a reliable method? In the light of recent tragedies such as Vioxx, where a drug shown to be safe (and even beneficial to the heart) in animals has gone on to cause as many as 140,000 heart attacks and strokes in people, it appears that animals are an inadequate safety screen.

Animal tests became mandatory following the Thalidomide tragedy forty years ago, in the hope that they would prevent another "Thalidomide". But have they lived up to their promise? Many studies comparing drug side-effects in humans and animals have found animal tests to be less predictive than tossing a coin. In fact, their true prediction rate is generally acknowledged to be between 5 and 25%.

• Dozens of drugs to treat strokes have been found safe and effective in animal studies but all of them have gone on to injure or kill patients in clinical trials.
• Aidsvax, successful in chimpanzees, gave no protection to 8,000 volunteers in human trials.
• Hormone replacement therapy, prescribed to many millions of women because it lowered monkeys' risk of heart disease and stroke, increases women's risks significantly.

GPs, MPs and scientists demand evaluation of animal-based drug safety tests

A survey of 500 GPs conducted by TNS Healthcare in August 2004 found that 82% of doctors are "concerned that animal data can be misleading when applied to humans" and 83% would "support an independent scientific evaluation of the clinical relevance of animal experimentation".

Europeans for Medical Progress is calling for an independent and transparent scientific evaluation of the use of animals as surrogate humans in drug safety testing and medical research. Many MPs support this call, which is made in Early Day Motion 92, whose wording is as follows:

State-of-the-art human-based tests could have prevented the Vioxx tragedy. The public deserves to be protected from another "Vioxx" in future. In order to ensure the best means to safeguard public health, an assessment needs to be made of the relative performance of the various methods of safety testing available. Substantial evidence exists that animal tests are inadequate for the task but – incredibly – this has never been systematically investigated. The only responsible course of action is to evaluate animal testing scientifically, in an independent and transparent manner.

Europeans for Medical Progress questions the value of animal experimentation, based on overwhelming evidence that findings from animal models cannot be reliably extrapolated to humans. For more information or to support our call for a scientific evaluation of animal testing, please see www.curedisease.net or email info@curedisease.net.