"Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:

On the day our one hundred thousand six hundred and forty signature Petition to Abolish Vivisection was presented to the Government on 24 April 1989, the event was covered by national television. In the very same news programme was a report that the asthma aerosol inhaler Fenoterol (also marketed as Berotec or Duovent) was dangerous. Doctors at Wellington Hospital said they wanted it withdrawn. It is important that members of this Committee see the connection between these two news items.

In a BBC debate entitled "Vivisection is a Scientific Con" dated 22 June 1987, it was revealed that in the United Kingdom alone aerosol-pressured dilators caused seventeen hundred deaths in 1984, and that between 1975 and 1985 asthma deaths doubled as the use of aerosol-pressured dilators trebled.

At a Congress organised by the International Association Against Painful Experiments on Animals held in Philadelphia on 24 June 1989, Dr Robert Sharpe said:

'Thousands of young asthma patients died in the 1960s following the use of aerosol inhalers.'

In the 1960s a mysterious epidemic killed many thousands of asthma sufferers in many countries. Dr Paul D. Stolley of Johns Hopkins Hospital finally found, in July 1972, the killer in the drug Isoproterenol, packaged in England as an aerosol-pressured dilator: he spoke of it as 'the worst therapeutic drug disaster on record'. Like all modern medicaments, aerosol-pressured dilators are developed, tested and refined on animals. On 13th March 1991 the Fenoterol findings were confirmed and the drug was withdrawn in NZ.

Mr Chairman, thousands of drugs deadly to the human-being have been first 'safety-tested' on animals before causing world-wide millions of cases of blindness, paralysis and death. Thirty thousand people were seriously damaged or killed in Japan alone from Clioquinol in the 1970s by Ciba Geigy. The symptoms they developed would today be classified as AIDS. Animal tests are an inconclusive alibi. Should a true model of testing be used the uselessness and danger to the human consumer would be exposed and the product would never reach the market.

In the months of haggling with the Committee of the previous government prior to this Hearing many more drugs have been found dangerous and withdrawn. The evidence of drug damage is so consistent, predictable and substantial that we no longer collect it. Instead we collect Doctors. Doctors against vivisection.

Mr Chairman, overwhelming evidence says that the greatest error of modern times is the fundamental error of basing human health on vivisection. Abolitionist doctors are urging that animals are different... biologically, physiologically, pharmacologically, pathologically, psychologically... in anatomy, in structure, in resistance and in sensitivity... different... not only to human beings, but to animals from other species.

Dr Pietro Croce, President of the International League of Doctors Against Vivisection, Luminary of Medicine at Turin Hospital, one of the world's most brilliant doctors wrote:

'There are over three hundred thousand animal species on our planet, not one of which is a model for man. It only needs the appropriate animal species to produce the desired result.'

Lord Platt, President of the Royal College of Physicians between 1957 and 1962 said:

'No amount of testing can make a drug safe because humans react differently from animals.'

But Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Chairman... this is the basis of our health system.

In West Germany's Wochenshrift (No. 34, 1969) Dr W.C. Muller, of the nation's first gynecological university clinic reported that a survey by German doctors had revealed that 'for 61 percent of all malformed children born alive, and 88 percent of all stillborn children, the intake of various drugs had to be held responsible.'

• German's Dr Herbert Stiller, Specialist in neurology, psychiatry and psychotherapy says in Animal Experiments and Animal Experimenters:

  'One in three babies are now being born with genetic deficiencies.'

• Germany's Dr Schneider in the Stuttgart Evening Paper 1971:

  'Animal research does not produce sensible medicines but it brings in the most profit.'

• Italy's Professor Pietro Croce says:

  'Within ten years, the Italian Ministry of Health has withdrawn from the market 22,621 drugs because of toxic side effects.'
  (Another Bulletin says: 'Within three years 14,836 'side effects' or 'toxic damages' were reported.')

• From the USA Ivan Illich US Health specialist in preventative medicine:

  'The general state of health of the population is worst in France with the highest consumption of medicines, and best in Holland with the lowest consumption of medicines.'

• Again from the USA: Barbara Loe Fisher and Harris Coulter from 'A Shot in the Dark', 1986:

  'The sad fact is that after more than forty years of subjecting pertussis vaccine to the mouse toxicity test - children are still dying and being brain-damaged after the vaccine has passed the test. Drug manufacturers and the FDA have known since at least the early 1960s that the vaccine was not being properly evaluated for toxicity, they continued to inject it into more than sixty million children during the following twenty years.'

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