A.N.I.M.A.L.

92 percent of drugs that pass animal tests never get approved for human use. However, they are given to animals in vivisection labs in doses that may be hundreds or thousands of times greater than what would ever be prescribed. These drugs—which may have serious or even fatal side-effects in humans—also end up in the public water supply. The laboratory animals full of the drugs excrete them, and the waste is flushed down the toilet.

As PETA Senior Researcher Alka Chandna, Ph.D., explains, vivisection drug-testing labs "test new pharmaceuticals that have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and for which water-treatment technologies may or may not exist." She also points out that the amount of drugs dumped by these labs into sewage systems may dwarf the amount coming from the surrounding human population. Moreover, sewage-treatment technologies "would need to be continually updated to handle new classes of drugs that would be tested on animals..."

Compounding the danger is that it is virtually impossible to know the cumulative effects of ingesting a mixture of drugs deemed unsafe for human use. Drug A may interact with drugs B or C to produce unique but unknown harmful effects. Children, the elderly, and/or certain demographics may be more susceptible than the population at large. Pets and wildlife are also forced to drink the drug cocktail.

In future posts, I will delve more into alternative, safer, more ethical, less sloppy, more scientifically rigorous, more predictive non-animal based methods for testing new drugs, which drastically reduce the occurrence of unsafe drugs being dumped into municipal drinking water and groundwater.