Why Palm Oil Free?

Test Image 2020.

Animal experiments are cruel, unreliable, and even dangerous. The harmful use of animals in experiments is not only cruel but also often ineffective.

They found that some certified oil palm concessions and supply bases had indeed replaced the habitats of endangered mammals and biodiverse tropical forests of Borneo and Sumatra over the last few decades.

According to the study, about 75% of RSPO concessions and supply bases are located in areas that have been deforested and/or where endangered large mammals lived just during the last 30 years. It found that 49% of Sumatran and 99% of Bornean certified supply bases were completely covered by tropical forests between 1984 and 1990, before being converted into oil palm plantations from 1990 to 2000.

Using dogs, rats, mice and rabbits to test whether or not a drug will be safe for humans provides little statistically useful insight, our recent analysis found. The study also revealed that drug tests on monkeys are just as poor as those using any other species in predicting the effects on humans.
Out of 93 dangerous drug side effects, only 19% could have been predicted by animal tests, a recent study found
Using mice and rats to test the safety of drugs in humans is only accurate 43% of the time, a recent study found
Out of 48 cancer drugs approved by the European Medicines Agency from 2009 to 2013 to treat 68 types of cancer, almost half showed no survival benefits according to a recent study. Even in cases where benefits were seen, the difference was judged to be ‘clinically insignificant’.

Despite the use of over 115 million animals in experiments globally each year, only 59 new medicines were approved in 2018 by the leading drug regulator, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Many of these are for rare diseases.
The US drug industry invests $50 billion per year in research, but the approval rate of new drugs is the same as it was 50 years ago.Only 6% of 4,300 international companies involved in drug development have registered a new drug with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since 1950.
Even those drugs that are approved are not universally effective due to individual reactions - the top ten highest-grossing drugs in the USA only help between 1 in 4 and 1 in 25 people who take them
Of over 1,000 potential stroke treatments that had been ‘successful’ in animal tests, only approximately 10% progressed to human trials. None worked sufficiently well in humans.
A review of 101 high impact basic science discoveries based on animal experiments found that only 5% resulted in approved treatments within 20 years.

Vioxx, a drug used to treat arthritis, was found to be safe when tested in monkeys (and five other animal species) but has been estimated to have caused around 320,000 heart attacks and strokes and 140,000 deaths worldwide.
Human volunteers testing a new monoclonal antibody treatment (TGN1412) at Northwick Park Hospital, UK in 2006 suffered a severe allergic reaction and nearly died. Testing on monkeys at 500 times the dose given to the volunteers totally failed to predict the dangerous side effects.
A recent drug trial in France resulted in the death of one volunteer and left four others severely brain damaged in 2016. The drug, which was intended to treat a wide range of conditions including anxiety and Parkinson’s disease, was tested in four different species of animals (mice, rats, dogs and monkeys) before being given to humans.
A clinical trial of Hepatitis B drug fialuridine had to be stopped because it caused severe liver damage in seven patients, five of whom died. It had been tested on animals first.
Only one third of substances known to cause cancer in humans have been shown to cause cancer in animals.

Animals do not get many of the diseases we do, such as Parkinson’s disease, major types of heart disease, many types of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, HIV or schizophrenia.
An analysis of over 100 mouse cell types found that only 50% of the DNA responsible for regulating genes in mice could be matched with human DNA.
The most commonly used species of monkey to test drug safety (Cynomolgous macaque monkeys), are resistant to doses of paracetamol (acetaminophen) that would be deadly in humans.
Due to the many important differences between monkeys and humans in brain structure and function, data collected from monkeys used in neuroscience research are misleading and of poor relevance to people, our recent analysis found.
Chocolate, grapes, raisins, avocados and macadamia nuts are harmless in people but toxic to dogs.
Aspirin is toxic to many animals, including cats, mice and rats and would not be on our pharmacy shelves if it had been tested according to current animal testing standards.