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24 Feb 2009 : Column 32WH—continued
The great increase in using animals, particularly mice, is due not just to stem cell research but to the fact that people now want animal models for cystic fibrosis and other diseases, given that they can obtain genes, put them into what are called knockout mice or nude mice and see what happens in the process, thereby studying the progress of a particular illness. The increase in the use of mice is justified by scientists on the basis that it will help to give us some input into sorting out diseases, whether rare diseases or other sorts.
I am going to say something that opens up the whole field. As a hardened scientist, I never questioned what I did. They were just things that one did. However, I think that we have now learned quite a bit. I pay tribute to FRAME and Professor Michael Balls. He and I worked together, argued together and taught together. As a matter of fact, I got him his job. When he was at Berkeley, I brought him back to this country. Ever since then, we have conversed about alternatives to animal experiments, although not in the sense of doing away with animal experiments completely, because it is recognised that—in some cases, anyway—they can be useful. However, we should be working much harder to develop not just regulations but new technologies to replace some animal experiments.
I say that because I have a Bill, which is supported by the hon. Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) and the Safer Medicines Campaign, to evaluate tests carried out on animals against the alternative methods coming to the fore. I had not realised how fast such alternative technologies were emerging until I attended a conference a few months ago at the Royal Society run by the Safer Medicines Campaign. There is an opening up among scientists. More and more scientists are getting involved in considering alternatives. We should welcome that, particularly if the validation process that we are trying to pass in Parliament allows us to assess whether animal experiments are working, whether they tell us what we think we can see in a mouse, a rat or other animal, and how other technologies compare.
As my hon. Friend said, there have been some tragedies in the field in which animal experiments on mice or other animals have been carried out, yet when the drug is put into human trials, a Northwick Park situation arises. In those trials, drugs for certain types of leukaemia—I will not go into the details—had adverse effects on people; in fact, they nearly died. Much has been written about that. In other instances involving pharmaceutical companies, there have been side effects that were not seen in animals but were seen in humans when the drug entered human trials. I know that if a drug is used, it is best to see how it works physiologically on the whole organism—I have used that argument in the Chamber. However, in physiology and biochemistry there are differences between animals and between animals and humans. That must be taken into consideration.
I am a great believer in some of the tests that have been carried out. My colleague, the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), always wants me to talk about Dundee university, where understanding how a basic scientific procedure called protein phosphorylation worked in normal organisms allowed the development of nine effective drugs to treat cancer. From a position of not understanding how something works, people can arrive at a point where it does work. As far as I know, there have been no adverse effects in that arena and it has to go through the legal process.
We all get letters from the public—I received letters about the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 because people did not like some of the things that were being done. Professor Michael Balls and I had a terrible fallout over some issues—he was watching what I was saying and we fell out and disagreed. That has been published. I have seen him since and there is no problem. We have argued out the matter.
Animal tests must be validated in some way, but they never have been. I have mentioned some cases where there have been problems. I want to talk not only about the number of animals involved, as my hon. Friend did, but about my concerns over the impact on patients of using animals as surrogate humans to develop and test new medicines. We rely on animals as a final safety screen before clinical trials on people. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, 92 per cent. of potential new drugs do not work in human trials. Sarah Boseley, a reporter from The Guardian, who I think is one of the best reporters in the country, digs deep and wins lots of prizes for what she unearths. She does not need the Freedom of Information Act 2000; she goes to countries such as Malawi in Africa and sees how drugs are being used in that community. She said:
“A million Britons are hospitalised by prescription medicines every year, costing the NHS £2 billion.”
It is admitted that drugs often have side effects, which can differ between different people. Drugs are metabolised and mobilised in different ways depending on our individual genetic make-up.
There have been lots of reports from the United States and a vision has developed there focused on trying to limit animal tests and replace them with new technologies. I will not describe all those new technologies, as they have been mentioned before. People are critical of some, but not of others. Using human tissue is a more favourable practice in laboratories because we can have banks of such tissues. They can be studied and we can understand how a new compound will work. There are DNA chips, where the effect of a drug on a particular gene is looked at on a slide. There are different computer models, and microdosing is new technology where small amounts of a drug can be given to a human to see what reaction it produces. At the conference that I attended, I found it stimulating to see the good sciences being used to try and work out alternative procedures. That is why I hope that the Bill manages to get somewhere as we look for validation of those technologies.
There have been many inquiries into animal testing. The Lords Select Committee, the Animal Procedures Committee, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Weatherall report all called for research into the validity of animal tests. None of those inquiries assess the effect of that on predicting drug safety, and that is a huge gap. The Committee on Safety of Medicine’s evaluation was the first, I think, to require a scientific comparison of the ability of animal tests to predict the risks of drugs in humans with the ability of a set of human biology-based tests. That is worth taking forward, and I compliment not only the Safer Medicines Campaign but also FRAME; they have continuously made us think about other ways of doing things.
Perhaps we can make savings by using these technologies. This is an expensive business involving animal housing, ensuring that welfare is properly provided, arranging Home Office visits and spending time in collecting data
from different laboratories. Enabling animal houses to be smaller would save a lot of money for a starving higher education process. I remember once in Portcullis House that I saved a university £1 million by ensuring that humans could not enter its animal building. It was thought that allowing access would leave it open to the kind of people who have recently been imprisoned for their violent behaviour because of their beliefs about animals. There is a huge change in the way that people think about animal experiments, the need for them and the possible alternatives. I welcome that. This scientific field might turn out some very exciting results.
11.45 am
Sir John Butterfill (Bournemouth, West) (Con): Following on from the last three speakers is quite difficult; nearly everything I was going to say has been said. However, I would like to join my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) in thanking the Minister for the courtesy that she showed when we met her a few weeks ago.
I have been involved with animal welfare for a long time. I am the longest serving trustee of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals. I was one of the founder members of FRAME, and we have been lucky to have Professor Michael Balls guiding us through the process ever since it started. I was attracted to FRAME because it was the sensible person’s approach to animal welfare and experimentation and not extreme in any way. Nearly all scientists engaged in this field are not wicked, extremist people who love torturing animals, as they are sometimes portrayed by the extreme animal rights wing. They are, for the most part, conscientious and careful. I know that from first-hand experience: for the past 40 years, my wife has been a fundraiser for Action Medical Research; she is now the south-east regional chairperson. The brunt of what Action Medical Research does—the cutting-edge research—largely involves stem cells rather than animals. I have met many of the scientists whom it employs and they are fine people who are conscious of the need to minimise the effect on animals of any research that they do.
However, there are some defects in the law as it stands. There is a lack of openness and transparency that must be addressed. One understands that much research might be commercially confidential. What drugs companies and others do is often expensive and their research must be protected to a degree. Nevertheless, particularly as a result of some EU legislation, there is a good deal of unnecessary duplication of research. We must be satisfied that efficacy is involved and that it is not duplication. We must be more demanding in what we ask of those who request consent to carry out these sorts of experiments. If we do that, I think that the public will be with us. How we present our case is extremely important. We are not trying to shut down experimentation, but we can take a lot of satisfaction from advances in research that mean that things that used to be indispensable are now not wholly necessary. Perhaps by being a little tougher, we will drive people into research which, although it might be more expensive and difficult, will reduce, rather than increase, the level of animal experimentation. We should therefore tighten up procedures.
11.50 am
Mr. Phil Willis (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD): Let me congratulate the hon. Member for Sunderland, North (Bill Etherington) on securing the debate. He is right that the House should constantly debate this issue. I had little difficulty with much of his speech, although I respectfully disagree with him on several issues, which I shall raise. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill) on putting the case for the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments so clearly. FRAME has brought respectability to this area of opposition, rather than simply adopting a black-and-white approach to animal testing, and I do not criticise its work.
Even if I wanted to, I could find no Member of the House and no scientist who uses animals for experiments who would not like to find an alternative way of doing those experiments. I do not believe that there is a demand, other than from people who are particularly perverse, for inflicting pain on animals. I acknowledge people’s genuine concerns about this issue, but I have real difficulty with the title and central thrust of today’s debate, which is really about the production of statistics and the idea that producing more statistics will somehow improve the lot of animals and reduce the number being used in experiments. Neither FRAME nor anyone else has produced evidence that having better statistics will drive down the number of animals being used.
Kerry McCarthy: May I give the hon. Gentleman an example that might help to answer his question? On the testing of household products, I gather that more than 100 chemicals are used in disinfectants and that more than 250 have been tested and are available for use. Surely, if statistics were available on the multitude of experiments being carried out to create ever more household products, there would be consumer demand not to license more experiments. Would not that be useful?
Mr. Willis: The duplication of experiments is nonsense—I do not think anyone could argue with that—and we are delighted that the UK no longer experiments on animals for household products or cosmetics. As I am sure the hon. Lady knows, however, the problem is that the new REACH—registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemical substances—regulation will revisit many of the compounds that are used in everyday chemicals because of the need to test the toxicity of each one. That will cause a real problem. A driver of that regulation is the need to control information more centrally.
We do not want just a simple debate on statistics and numbers; we want a debate on why we are using animals in science. More than 3.2 million procedures were started in 2007—a rise of 6 per cent. on the previous year. There have been significant rises, year on year, in the number of animals used in science, and it is absolutely right that we put those statistics on the table. Since 2000, the number of scientific procedures performed on animals has risen, and we have to ask why. This is where I disagree with the hon. Member for Sunderland, North, because, as the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) has mentioned, the rise in the number of animals is due largely to the increasing use of genetically altered animals—mostly mice, not primates, cats or dogs. Genetically altered mice are engineered to have
particular diseases, and drugs or chemicals are created to knock out that disease. There has been a move to improve medical science by using genetically altered animals.
I have heard strong condemnation of the work on the three Rs, which was an incredibly positive development set up by Lord Sainsbury when he was Minister for Science and Innovation. Rather than being a barometer of the lack of progress for the three Rs, statistics have provided an indicator of current trends in research. An increase in numbers can reflect an increase in the overall amount of research done, and therefore of the benefits to patients.
The central driver for the vast majority of research using animals is the laudable objective of improving human health. As the UK is particularly successful in biomedical research—we are second only to the United States, so we are leaders in that key area—it is not unreasonable to think that there will be an increase in the number of animals used in the UK for such research. One particular statistic is worth noting because it has been produced by the Home Office and the Department of Health—the proportion of animals used, despite increases in biomedical science, is going down.
Let me return to the point that the hon. Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) made about the European directive. There have been slight misunderstandings regarding FRAME’s position and the way in which the new scientific directive, directive 86/609/EEC, is being considered and discussed. We in the UK are proud of our high standards in the treatment of animals in science. Covance—a private, US-based company—has laboratories in my constituency where a significant amount of testing on animals is done. I have visited those laboratories many times, and I have been astounded by the efforts that are made to maintain and look after the animals, with the best of husbandry. Recent efforts being made in England include bringing in animals in colonies, rather than in individual breeding pairs, to replicate their home conditions. In this area, we lead Europe, and it is important that the directive is used to ensure that the standards of animal care throughout the EU come up to ours, rather than go down.
I agree with the hon. Member for Southend, West that the directive is badly worded. It needs considerable revision before it becomes law. There is misunderstanding about the fact that any European directive has to be framed in the image of each particular nation, and it is up to the UK Government to frame the directive in British law according to how we want it. The hon. Gentleman’s party has accused the Government of gold-plating EU directives, but this one does not need gold-plating. Indeed, we should maintain the high standards of openness and transparency on which Labour Governments of the past 12 years have a decent record.
[David Taylor in the Chair]
I am also concerned about the hon. Gentleman’s comment on the use of great apes—or green apes, as the case may be—and where we would find them in a dire emergency. At the moment there are 1,400 great apes in breeding programmes in the United States. It is not the case that there would not be sufficient great apes available in an emergency, if needed. There are another 600 great apes in active research programmes in the US.
The hon. Gentleman’s point about the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods is right. Particularly over the past five to six years, that organisation has established a terrific reputation throughout Europe. It would be sad if this directive moved us in the opposite direction.
I have four cats and two dogs and a great number of mice despite them. On speaking to my wife this morning and telling her that I was filling in as Liberal Democrat spokesman on this subject this morning, she said, “I hope you are going to support a total ban on all animal experiments.” I replied, “I’m sorry dear, we’ll have to continue to disagree on that.”
There is a need for greater transparency about the benefits of using animals in medical science. Looking at the huge breakthroughs in medical science and the number of diseases for which cures have been found as a result of testing on animals puts these matters into perspective. The hon. Member for Norwich, North, who leads much of the work on cancer research in the House, would accept that the huge advances in cancer treatment have come about not just as a result of animal testing, although it has been part and parcel of them. The same applies to antibiotics and vaccines. Animals have been used to develop cures for everything from smallpox to polio, insulin, tetanus, rubella and anthrax. If we go down the road of saying, “At this moment in time, we can suddenly find cures without using animals”, we do so at our peril.
David Taylor (in the Chair): Order. I have to interrupt the hon. Gentleman. I should like to call the other Front-Bench spokesman at an early point and call the Minister at 12.15 pm.
Mr. Willis: I have finished, Mr. Taylor.
12.3 pm
Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con): Mr. Taylor, thank you for calling me to speak on behalf of Her Majesty’s Opposition. This has been an excellent debate. I welcome the opportunity to discuss this subject. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sunderland, North (Bill Etherington) on his contribution and thank other hon. Members who have spoken. There is consensus on most issues among hon. Members in this Chamber today and among the Government and the Opposition, and there is little that we have to disagree on. A lot of progress has been made and much more must be made in years to come.
Today’s debate has been useful. I particularly commend the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) about the work of the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments, and I commend the excellent work that he does with my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill) in the all-party group on FRAME. We look forward to making progress on this matter in the years to come.
The Minister will be taking a sabbatical quite soon and we all wish her well. I know that she feels as passionately about this matter as we all do. We look forward with hope to using the cross-party consensus to move this agenda forward.
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