Chemie Grunenthal & Thalidomide

 Animal Experiments

A living Hell

 (Extracted from Slaughter of the Innocent by Hans Ruesch)

 A dog is crucified in order to study the duration of the agony of Christ. A pregnant bitch is disembowelled to observe the maternal instinct in the throes of pain. Experimenters in an American university cause convulsions in dogs and cats, to study their brain waves during seizures, which gradually become more frequent and severe until the animals are in a continual state of seizure that leads to their death in 3 to 5 hours; the experimenters then supply several charts of the brain waves in question, but no idea how they could be put to any practical use.

Another team of "scientists" submits to fatal scaldings 15,000 animals of various species, then administers to half of them a liver extract which is already known to be useful in cases of shock: As expected, the treated animals agonise longer than the others.

Beagles, well known for their mild and affectionate natures, are tortured until they start attacking each other. The "scientists" responsible for this announce that they were "conducting a study on juvenile delinquency."

Exceptions? Borderline cases? I wish they were.

Every day of the year, at the hands of white-robed individuals recognised as medical authorities, or bent on getting such recognition, or a degree, or at least a lucrative job, millions of animals - mainly mice, rats, guinea-pigs, hamsters, dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys, pigs, turtles; but also horses, donkeys, goats, birds and fish - are slowly blinded by acids, submitted to repeated shocks or intermittent submersion, poisoned, inoculated with deadly diseases, disembowelled, frozen to be revived, starved, or left to die of thirst, in many cases after various glands have been entirely or partially extirpated or the spinal cord has been cut.

The victim's reactions are then meticulously recorded, except during the long weekends, when the animals are left unattended to meditate about their sufferings; which may last weeks, months, years, before death puts an end to their ordeal - death being the only effective anaesthesia most of the victims get to know.

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS & OTHER MEDICAL FRAUD

(Extracted from Naked Empress or the Great Medical Fraud, written by Hans Ruesch)

It is not only scandalous but also tragic that the Drug Trust is permitted to flood the market with its products on the grounds that they have been thoroughly tested for effectiveness and safety on animals, and that Health Authorities, meaning the Government, abet this deception, which is nothing but confirmed fraud. For both sides are well aware that animal tests are both fallacious and merely serve as an alibi - an insurance against the day when it is no longer possible to conceal the disastrous side effects of a drug. They can then say that "all the required tests have been made" - that they have imposed those laws, because the Lawmaker has no choice in all medical questions but to submit to the dictates of the "medical experts." And who are they? Agents of the Chemo-Medical Syndicate, whose links to the Health Authorities are so close that they usually overlap. So they, and no one else impart biding orders to that mysterious and omnipotent individual, identified anonymously as "The Lawmaker."

It is this outrageous state of affairs which once caused Dr. James D. Gallagher, Director of Research of Lederle Laboratories, to declare:

Another basic problem which we share as the result of the regulations and things that prompted them is an unscientific preoccupation with animal studies. Animal studies are done for legal reasons and not for scientific reasons. The predictive value for such studies for man is meaningless - which means our research may be meaningless. (Journal of the American Medical Association, March 14, 1964)

In fact, the so-called "medical experts" that have imposed animal tests as the touchstone of medical research are among the participants in the greatest fraud that has ever been perpetrated, mainly for profit motives, to the detriment of mankind in all history. To bring exhaustive proof of this assertion, with its growing number of medical people in full agreement, is the purpose of this expose.

Anybody who has ever taken care of a pet or any other animal has learned, either through personal experience or from a veterinarian, that one should never administer a human medicine to animals, for they may die from it. What does this mean? Obviously, that an animal organism reacts differently from a human organism, and that a medicine that benefits the one could harm the other.

But even people who are fully aware of this basic fact have been conned, through press agentry and the venality of the mass media, into accepting animal tests as a sure-fire safeguard, and will declare unthinkingly, regardless of the available evidence: "Since new medicines have to be tested, I prefer that they be tested on animals rather than on me."

This seemingly humanitarian ointment has two gigantic flies: First, that we constantly need new medicines; secondly, that animal tests give satisfactory information.

These are fallacies, which have been imposed, like religious dogmas that may not be disputed, upon the majority of people through systematic brainwashing. It begins for most of us long before the age of reason: First, in the likewise thoroughly conditioned family, in primary school next; through higher education, and the media afterwards.

"Everything that is obtained with animals is perfectly conclusive for man. Experiments made on animals with noxious substances or in detrimental conditions are perfectly conclusive for the toxicology and hygiene of man. The research on medical or toxic substances is also entirely applicable to man from a therapeutic point of view."

It was Claude Bernard, the apostle of today's veterinary-based medical research, who made these and similarly silly statements in his most famous work, Introduction to Experimental Medicine, which in 1865 laid the ground stone for today's medical researchers - all the growing, grievous proof of its erroneousness notwithstanding.

In fact, there is no such thing today as 'Science' in medicine - if we give to the word its original meaning of "Knowledge", instead of "Research", which is the meaning it has acquired in the United States today. Current Medical Science is nothing but a false dogma, imposed almost universally, by no matter what means, legitimate or not, by a smoothly organised coterie that in all industrialised nations form the Medical Power, in close alliance with the Chemical Syndicate. Their purpose is not the people's health, which is just being used as a pretext to extort large sums of money, but the aggrandisement of their own wealth and might.

True science presupposes free information, and exchange of different points of views. In the medical field this does not exist today. Too many honest and courageous doctors who have tried to voice opinions in contract with the "accepted" doctrines imparted by the Faculties - for instance, by warning people of the cancer racket or the effects of certain mass vaccinations imposed from above in the interest of the lucrative, job-providing industries - have all been quickly discouraged from continuing or silenced, have been regularly excluded from the news-making medical conventions (that's why all candidates must submit months beforehand the texts of the lectures they intend to deliver), and have been relegated to the bottom rung of the professional ladder, from where they can't express successfully any opinion-making view; or they have been expelled outright from the medical community. We shall examine other forms of censorship later.

And it is because of such systematic censorship, running parallel with a constant flow of bombastic medical propaganda, that occasional outbursts of candour, like the preceding statement by Dr. Gallagher, and the following one by Dr. Modell, have quickly fallen into the trough of oblivion, never again to be resurrected by their chastened authors.

 205,000 PREPARATIONS

Already over 20 years ago, Dr. Walter Modell of Cornell University's Medical College, Whom Time had described as "one of America's foremost drug experts," wrote in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics:

When will they realise that there are too many drugs? No fewer than 15,000 new mixtures and dosages hit the market each year, while about 12,000 die off ... We simply don't have enough diseases to go around. At the moment the most helpful contribution is the new drug to counteract the untoward effects of other new drugs. (Time, May 26, 1961)

Since 1961, the total number of medical preparations marketed world-wide has risen to some 205,000 and the new maladies have increased in the same proportion.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, 1.5 million Americans had to be hospitalised in 1978 as a consequence of taking drugs (which were supposed to "cure" them of something or other). And some 30% of all hospitalised people get further damaged by the therapy which is imposed on them. The number of people killed in the USA by the intake of drugs has been estimated at some 140,000 each year.

In fact, today the medical care industry is the second biggest business in North America, exceeded only by food production and distribution.

The situation is very similar in all industrialised countries whose citizens are amply "protected" by a Health Insurance system that encourages the use of drugs and expensive therapies, and extracts, from the gullible lower citizens, billions in tax money that flow directly into the coffers of the Chemo-Medical Syndicate.

LET THE DOCTORS STRIKE

So it is hardly a coincidence that during a 29 day physicians' strike in Israel in 1973, the national death rate was the lowest ever. According to statistics released by the Jerusalem Burial Society, The number of funerals dropped by nearly 50% on that occasion.

The same thing happened in 1976 in Columbia, when November marked the end of a 52 day strike by doctors in Bogota, the nation's capital. The National Catholic Reporter pointed out that during those eight weeks the death rate in Bogota went down 35%. The National Morticians Association of Columbia confirmed the fact.

The identical phenomenon came to pass a few years ago in California, and in 1978 in Great Britain.

MAN AND ANIMALS

Two grams of scopolamine kill a human being, but dogs and cats can stand hundred times higher dosages. A single Aminata phalloides mushroom can wipe out a whole human family, but is health food for the rabbit, one of the favourite laboratory animals. A porcupine can eat one lump without discomfort as much opium as a human addict smokes in two weeks, and wash it down with as much prussic acid to poison a regiment of soldiers. The sheep can swallow enormous quantities of arsenic, once the murderer's favourite poison. Morphine, which calms and anaesthetises man, causes maniacal excitement in cats and mice. On the other hand our sweet almond can kill foxes, our common parsley is poisonous to parrots, and our revered penicillin strikes another favourite laboratory animal dead - the guinea pig.

The list can be lengthened at will, but these few instances should suffice to show them there couldn't be a more unreliable test for new drugs (that aren't needed in the first place) than animal experimentation. see table overleaf)

The so-called Health authorities and researchers are fully aware of this fact, but they continue serving the warmed-over dish to the media and the public: Do you want us to test new drugs on your children?

In fact, all synthetic products are harmful and all new drugs are being tested on you and your children all the time, because the animal tests which - it bears repetition - have just an alibi function, could give no answer, or, worse, have given misleading answers as to their effect on human beings. This rule knows no exception.

In fact, the therapeutic disasters, steadily on the increase today, did not exist before the imposition of the safety tests done on animals. They are a direct result of widespread animal experimentation.

THE POISON PUSHERS

Without a large number of always new synthetic medicines with mysterious or magic sounding names to fall back on, most of today's physicians would not know how to ply their trade. And yet at medical school they only get a limited instruction in pharmacology, because the teachers themselves can't keep up with the steady flow of new products that invade the market to replace those that must be withdrawn when it is no longer possible to conceal their uselessness or harmfulness.

The young doctors start learning their profession only when they leave medical school , and direct contact with patients starts. At the same time begins their real pharmacological education, which will accompany them through their career. The education is conducted by the flood of brochures from the drug manufacturers, and their travelling salesmen, who pay them personal calls at regular intervals, bearing gifts like gold fountain pens or invitations to duck-shoots - besides satchels full of samples of "new" drugs which they advise to try out on the patients and then to report (against remuneration) their findings. This shows clearly that the laboratory experiments have taught them nothing.

In other words, the budding doctor does not receive his medical education from his teachers at medical school, whose knowledge has gotten stuck several years earlier, but by high-pressure salesmen of industrial complexes, whose purpose is not the people's health (a healthy population means a dead pharmaceutical industry) but ever growing profits.

 CONSEQUENCES

Due to a "safe" painkiller, Paracetamol, 1,500 people had to be hospitalised in Great Britain in 1971; as usual, a good number of them were further damaged by the therapy imposed upon them while in hospital.

At about the same time, in the United States, Orabilex caused kidney damage with fatal outcomes, MEL/29 caused cataracts, Methaqualone caused severe psychic disturbances leading to at least 366 deaths, mainly through murder or suicide.

Germany's Thalidomide, which caused at least 10,000 malformed children, was merely the firs of a quickly growing list of "teratogenic" (malformation causing) drugs, that have dramatically increased the number of birth defects ever since the compulsory animal tests as an alleged safeguard against that kind of mishap have been imposed.

In 1972 the aerosol spray, Isoproterenol, packaged in great Britain, was found by Dr. Paul D. Stolley of Johns Hopkins Hospital as being responsible for the mysterious epidemic that had killed world-wide as many as 3,500 asthma sufferers in the Sixties.

Stilboestrol caused cancer in young women. In the fall of 1975, Italy's health authorities seized the anti-allergic Trilergan, which had caused the very viral hepatitis that the researchers had been promising to eliminate once and for all many years ago, but which has been spreading steadily since then.

In early 1976 the Salvoxyl-Wander laboratories of Switzerland's Sandoz complex withdrew their Flamanil, advertised to fight rheumatism, but had turned out to cause loss of consciousness.

A few months later, Great Britain's gigantic ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) announced that it had started paying compensation to the victims (or their survivors) of its cardiotonic Eraldin, and resorted to the usual alibi that the drug had been introduced to the market only after 7 years of "very intensive laboratory tests" - meaning on animals, which had given the poisonous medication a clean bill of health. By then, countless consumers had suffered severe damages to the eyes and digestive tracts, and many had died.

In the summer of 1977, The Swiss multi-national, Ciba-Geigy had to withdraw from the American market its Phenformin, which had been palmed off on diabetics for 18 years: it was no longer possible to conceal that its collateral effects had caused about 1,000 deaths annually. Nevertheless, after this had been announced in the press, the Health Authorities in the German Federal Republic gave its own drug manufacturers a helping hand and a whole year's time- until July 1, 1978 - to sell off its stock of lethal anti-diabetic drugs, including Dipar, Silubin-retard and Sindatil. Clearly, what mattered was not the public's health, but the Syndicate's profits.

On September 11, 1979, a panel of doctors and former Valium addicts told a US Senate Subcommittee on Health that Valium, a tranquilliser taken routinely by more than 15% of the adult population, was potentially addictive even in moderate doses. The former users said they experienced agonising withdrawal symptoms when they tried to drop the drug, and they complained that their doctors never informed them of the drug's potential addictive qualities when first prescribing it.

THE LEGALISED MASSACRE (CONTINUED)

Preludin and Maxiton, "pep pills" also used to reduce appetite, were withdrawn from the market after causing serious damages to the heart and the nervous system.

Barbiturates (Nembutal etc.), prescribed against insomnia, turn out in the long run to increase insomnia instead of curing it.

Pronap and Plaxin, two tranquilliser, have killed many babies in South Africa and were withdrawn in 1970.

Phenacetin, only recently taken off the market in the United States, is a painkiller sold in various compositions under 200 different brand labels. It can block the kidney functions, destroy the kidneys, cause kidney tumours and destroy the red blood corpuscles.

Amydopyrine, another painkiller, has caused lethal damage to the blood, including agranulocytosis, and has been withdrawn in many countries, but not in all. It occurs in Salgydal, in association with Phenacetin, in Optalidon and in over 160 other products.

Marzine, used against nausea and travel sickness, has been withdrawn in 1971 in many countries (e.g. Switzerland and Italy) because of the grave damage it inflicts, especially in children.

Reserpine, prescribed to reduce blood pressure, has been shown to increase threefold the risk of breast cancer in women. It is also considered to increase the risk of cancer of the brain, the pancreas, the uterus, the ovaries and the skin. It is furthermore famous for causing nightmares and depression.

Cyclophosphamide, another drug advertised to fight cancer, provokes widespread necroses which start in the liver and the lungs and usually kill the patient much sooner than the cancer would, as do most drugs employed to "check" cancer by chemotherapy. "A Miracle Drug That Backfired" was the title of an International Herald Tribune article on January 14, 1981. It began by recalling that American physicians had started prescribing Clofibrate massively 13 years before because:

The drug seemed to offer modern man the luxury of having his cake and eating it too - that is, of continuing to devour steak and butter without fear of heart attack just by taking a little capsule four times a day ... Far from saving lives, it now appears that Clofibrate actually increases the death rate among its users. A decade long study run by the World Health Organisation (WHO) recently reported that men taking the drug were 25% more likely to die of a broad range of disorders, including cancer, stroke, respiratory disease and ironically, heart attack, than those who got a placebo capsule.

But don't get depressed folks. Thousands of other confused or just grant-hungry scientists are currently busy using up millions of fresh animals trying to find new products capable of neutralising the disastrous side-effects of Clofibrate and other miracle drugs.

NEW MALADIES

The Oxychinol Case

The systematic fraud perpetrated by the all-powerful Chemical Syndicate in collusion with the various Health Institutes to the detriment of the world population's health is growing day by day. And yet proof comes to light day after day that the "new drugs" (in actual fact they are mostly the same old drugs with identical ingredients in varying combinations and under different labels) are not only incapable of curing diseases that nature couldn't cure by herself given half a chance, but are constantly producing brand new diseases, unknown a few years ago.

In August 1978 came the news from Japan that a Tokyo court had found three drug manufacturers and the Japanese government guilty of selling drugs containing Oxychinol (also called Clioquinol), responsible for a new, severe disease of the nervous system - subacute myeloptic neuropathy, or SMON for short. The manufacturers - Takeda, Ciba-Geigy Japan and Tanabe Seijaku - were sentenced along with the Japanese health authorities to pay indemnities of 3.25 billion Yen (approx.. $17 million or £5 million) to 133 plaintiffs. This was the conclusion of but the first of over 20 court cases currently under way.

The plaintiffs had demonstrated that SMON was caused by drugs that had been sold under the protest that they would miraculously cure what the manufacturers had defined as "summer diarrhoea", a highly unscientific definition for a mild intestinal disorder that affects a great number of travellers in tropical lands; Americans usually call it the "GI's" or "Montezuma's revenge", and the British "Spanish tummy", and it usually clears up without treatment within 48 hours.

That is, unless one takes the "miracle" drug Oxychinol that Ciba-Geigy had developed several years earlier, and marketed world-wide under different labels (Mexaform, Enterovioform, Intestopan, Sterosan etc.), recommending them to travellers at the first sign of indigestion, and even prophylactically, i.e. before developing any intestinal troubles (which this drug causes!).

At least a thousand deaths had to be counted in Japan and 30,000 cases of blindness and/or paralysis of the lower limbs before it was realised that heretofore unexplained similar cases of death, blindness and paralysis in Holland, Denmark, Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, Sweden etc had also been caused by the Oxychinol-containing drugs.

These findings exploded Ciba-Geigy's lame alibi that only Japanese had been adversely affected by this drug and that therefore the Japanese were themselves to blame for their national catastrophe, having fallen for the manufacturer"s claims with exaggerated confidence!

In 1979, a Swedish medical doctor Olle Hansson, Professor of paediatric neurology at Goteborg University, published in a book the findings of the Tokyo court, which had summoned him to testify at the first Oxychinol trial. In this book he leaves no doubts about the fact that some big drug manufacturers do not hesitate to walk over corpses - human corpses - for the sake of profits, and resort to any and every kind of lie to conceal the fact that pecuniary gain is their ruling motivation.

In Japan alone, Oxychinol was sold under 168 different brand names.

The many shocking findings of Dr. Olle Hansson's study include the disclosure of Ciba-Geigy's own research protocols, dated as far back as June 19, 1939, showing that the Swiss researchers managed to poison a goodly number of animals, who were seized by violent convulsions and respiratory difficulties as soon as they were made to swallow Oxychinol, and most of them finally met with a painful death.

In spite of these results, which were kept secret, Ciba-Geigy proceeded to market its dangerous drug world-wide, limiting itself to publishing a warning in its accompanying leaflets to the effect that the drug should not be administered to house pets.

What does this prove? Clearly, that the researchers themselves do not believe in the validity of animal tests in respect to human beings.

The DES Case

Slaughter of the Innocent related in some detail the Stilboestrol case. The full scientific name for the drug is Diethylstilboestrol, but is commonly known as DES in the United States. The prototype of all synthetic oestrogens (female sex hormones), it was developed in 1939, tested without adverse effects on animals for years, but then it was suddenly found to have caused cancer in girls whose mothers had been prescribed this "miracle drug" by their doctors during pregnancy, as DES passes through the placental barrier and can trigger a cancer in the foetus.

But why had this drug been administered to pregnant women in the first place? Doesn't every drug taken during pregnancy hold a danger? Clearly, not to the knowledge of the "researchers" raised in the false belief that what they see in animals applies to man as well. And in fact they had prescribed DES to their patients for the very reason that they were pregnant: the drug was touted to insure a safe pregnancy.

After DES had turned out to be the first drug that the medical confraternity itself had recognised as being responsible for creating a new type of cancer in human beings, animal tests with DES were started over again, and again with no results: the test animals did not develop cancer.

Dr. Robert W. Miller of the National Cancer Institute of Bethesda, Md., Who in 1973 wrote the official warning hastily published by Geneva's WHO, revealed in that paper:

Experimental animal studies: There was no correlation between the types of tumours obtained in experimental models (i.e. laboratory animal - H.R.) and types of childhood cancer.

Dr. Miller either lacked the wisdom to draw the conclusion that animal experimentation had to be discarded as tragically misleading after that, or he lacked the courage to acknowledge it, which is more likely, for he and thousands of Bethesda co-workers live from animal experiments, since they don't know of any other way of doing research or, perhaps, of earning a living. In fact, all Dr. Miller had to offer in his paper was to recommend an intensification of such experiments, even thought the cases he had reported had developed after a latency period of 14 to 22 years.

The N.Y. Times of July 17, 1979 had an article titled "Woman Wins Suit in DES Case" which began:

In a groundbreaking verdict rendered yesterday in the State Supreme Court in the Bronx, a jury decided that a pharmaceutical company must pay $500,000 in damages to a woman for cancer caused by DES, a drug given to her mother to prevent miscarriages...

The plaintiff was identified as Joyce Bichler, a 25 year old social worker, and the manufacturer sentenced to pay up was Ely Lilly & Co..

On August 26, 1979, another article in the N.Y. Times was titled "A Woman Who Said DES Caused a Cancer Is Awarded $800,000." The woman: 26 year old Anne Needham. The manufacturer liable for the damage, White Laboratories of Kennilworth, J.J., was meanwhile taken over by Schering-Plough Corporation. The article concluded:

During the trial, Mr. Charfoos (the plaintiffs attorney - H.R.), said some 400 women had developed vaginal cancer because their mother took the drug and that at least 1,000 other female offspring were in pre-cancerous condition.

While cancer marches on in all the countries whose obtuse, herd populations allow themselves to be dominated by the Medical Power and the chemical industry, one question still begs for an answer: Why are the drug manufacturers still being tried by civil courts and not, as should certainly be the case, by criminal courts under the indictment of mass murder? The explanation is in the following parts.

Time Magazine had another DES daughters article in its March 24, 1980 issue, which read in part:

Now there is more unsettling news for DES daughters. When they reach child-bearing age, they appear to be more vulnerable to miscarriage - as well as to stillbirth, premature birth and ectopic pregnancy (in which the foetus grows outside the uterus).

The New England Journal of Medicine and other medical publications gave more news and all of it was bad. Damage from DES can extend to the third generation, and also affect the genital organs of the male offspring.

- PS: DES is still on the market as a "morning after" pill. Ironically, the exact opposite of its original intents.

MALFORMATIONS MULTIPLYING

In the chapter "Ten Thousand Little Monsters", Slaughter of the Innocent brought full, indisputable and undisputed evidence that animal experimentation not only caused the world-wide Thalidomide tragedy, but was directly responsible for the magnitude of that tragedy.

In its February 23, 1962 issue, when the first warning signs were appearing on the world horizon, Time Magazine reported that Thalidomide had been marketed "after three years of animal tests."

On August 1, 1958, the German manufacturers, Chemie Grunenthal, had sent a letter to 40,000 German doctors describing his Contergan (Thalidomide) as the best tranquilliser for pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers, as it damaged neither mother nor child.

In October 1961, the British licensee, Distillers Company, after extensive animal tats of its own, had launched Thalidomide on the United Kingdom market, under the name Distaval, with the following assurance:

"Distaval can be given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without adverse effect on mother or child."

In December 1970, the longest criminal trial in Germany's judicial history ended with the acquittal of Chemie Grunenthal: a long line of international medical authorities had testified that animal tests could never be conclusive for human beings, thus relieving Grunenthal of any responsibility for the tragedy: the required tests had been conscientiously undertaken.

When the vivisectionists fail once more, do they blush, pack up their easy-learner kits and sink off into the night? Of course not. They just clamour for more money to repair the damage they have just done.

The Thalidomide case should have ruled out further animal tests once and for all. Against all logic, with nothing but profit motive in mind and in complete disregard of the consumer's safety, the animal tests were multiplied - with easily predictable, catastrophic results.

CAN YOU TELL

RODENTS (MICE/RATS) (the most commonly used laboratory animals)

1. Plaque (fatty deposits) are deposited in the liver.

2. 3-year life span requires massive doses for drug/product testing - more than humans will ever use.

3. Imuran (immunosuppresive) causes birth defects in mice.

4. Manufacture Vitamin C in their bodies.

5. Lysodren (cancer chemotherapy), does not cause kidney damage in rodents.

6. Continual pregnancy healthier for rodents.

7 Hypersensitive to chlorine in minute doses.

8. Manufacture Vitamin B in the appendix.

9. Myambutol (TB antibiotic) causes birth defects in mice.

10. Eliminate drugs from body in 3 hours (faster elimination reduces drug danger).

11. Thymidine shrinks tumours in mice.

12. Catapress (anti-hypertensive) causes retinal degeneration in rats.

13. Can't tolerate more than 15 minutes of direct sunlight.

14. Chloroform toxic to mice in minute doses.

15. Obtain Vitamin D by licking their own fur.

16. Moban (tranquilliser) causes breast tumours in mice.

17. Specially bred for laboratory studies. Live in a controlled, sterile environment. Majority of diseases induced through genetic breeding (tumours and genetic defects), or from parasitic infections.

18. Rats have no bladder - digest fats differently.

19. Require 3.5 times more protein than humans.

20. Thalidomide (tranquilliser) does not cause birth defects in rats.