Animal Testing Should Not Be Banned - 1851 Words

Picture yourself applying your favorite make-up or taking medicine prescribed to you by your doctor, and ask yourself, how do you know it s safe? Have you ever wondered what goes in to make sure that cosmetics and medicine isn’t lethal? A majority of ensuring items such as medicine and cosmetics are safe to use is done by testing the medicine and cosmetics on a multitude of different kinds of animals (Abbott 1). Animal testing saved many lives in the past (â€Å"Animal†, par.7) but as science bred new methods, much like in vitro, which uses human cells cultivated in a lab, the potential for a replacement to animal testing arose (Abbott 1). Whether or not one is more effective than the other has been a hot topic for years, and multiple studies†¦show more content†¦If the animal shows any irritation or damage, it is possible to decide whether or not the chemical is permissible to use in consumer products. Experiments such as these are performed to test whether or not items like mascara are safe for humans to use depending on the reaction of the animal (Abbott 1). Many of these experiments require hundreds of animals to get a clear result (Abbott 1). As animal testing progressed throughout history, health organizations and industries started the initiation of alternative tests, which involve a number of different approaches that do not involve animals. Finding alternatives to testing with animals wasn’t a main priority for many, until the European Union initiated a program called REACH, which stands for Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (Abbott 1). This initiative required European countries to document the 30,000+ chemicals that are used in experiments to measure the safety of cosmetics and medications. Issuing this initiative caused many agencies to become concerned with how much it would cost to go through all of these animal tests and document each chemical (Abbott 1). Due to this reason, many began to implem ent the new alternatives that were presented to many agencies. These different types of alternatives all stem from in vitro procedures. In vitro testing uses cells that are cultivated in a lab to form different tissues for scientists to test. For example, the different