Bird Flu

[lady_p_gold]

I understand that the vaccine has to be made in live animals.   I would be interested to know what people who object to experiments to animals feel about this and how they feel about it.   Also does anyone actually know how it is done ???

[nicola_red]

Weeellll, I'm a vegan and as such I disagree with all animal experiments, purely because animals just aren't comparable to humans in enough ways for the results to be valid.  Thalidomide is still the perfect example.  I won't go into the arguments in detail here but anyone interested can read:

http://www.animalaid.org.uk/viv/index.htm

[morg_monster]

The ingredients for the flu vaccine is made by growing the virus in unfertilised chicken eggs.  So no live animals are involved, except for the hen that supplied the eggs...  This is why people who are allergic to eggs should not have the flu vaccine.  It is possible to make the vaccine not using eggs, but it is much much more expensive. 

Nicola: Just an aside, the thalidomide situation is actually not a very good example of the 'animals are too different from humans' argument against animal testing, the problem was that thalidomide was never tested on PREGNANT animals.  If it had been, then the teratogenic effects would have been seen in the young animals, as they were in the babies of women who took thalidomide.