Alternative Treatment for Diabetes

The first one, or perhaps everyone, who reads this probably will disagree with what I have to say. However, I hope you disagree. Please tell me if this speech changes your opinion. It is suppose to be ten minutes. Please suggest anything that would make my speech stronger.

In 1990 the founder of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Ingrid Newkirk told a reporter that if an AIDS cure resulted from animal research, “we’d still be against it.” I appreciate the efforts that animal activists put forth on securing animal rights, emphasizing that animals are not ours to be tested on. However, when it comes to ensuring human life, I disagree. Should we not take the best lead we have to cure a disease like AIDS, which has already killed 28million people? Should we take thousands of animals and place their lives above millions of people, which they have saved and will save? Scientific effort based on animal testing is a sacrifice that must be made to pledge the safety of human health. Without these mammals for testing, scientific progress crucial to the safety and development of medicine and food will drop sharply. If humanity risks such a decline in scientific progress, people around the world will face limitations on food and future medical treatments.
The most important reason humanity requires animal testing is to solve medical issues. One of the advantages of animal testing is the ability for medical procedures to be run safely and efficiently on humans after testing it on animals. Open-heart surgery, which is now the most common form of heart surgery in the U.S, required about 20 years of animal testing on cats by Doctor John Gibbon of Jefferson Medical College to ensure safety and efficiency. Unfortunately, not all medical procedures pass through sufficient testing before entering the market. The Food and Drug Administration distributed a jaw implant called Vitek in 1983, without sufficient testing. This malfunctioned jaw implant resulted in thousands of people suffering from severe pain when their jaws were literally torn apart. One year later, scientists tested the Vitek jaw on canine dogs, which resulted in immediate jaw damage and erosion. Had the FDA required such testing, many painful and permanent injuries would have been prevented*.
In the past, many diseases like Polio and Diabetes killed hundreds of thousands of humans. The only way scientists were able to combat these diseases was through animal testing. One of the best accomplishments made through animal testing was the vaccine for polio developed in1955, an epidemic that killed about 60,000 people a year, targeting primarily children. A doctor named Jonas Stalk was determined to find prevention not with his patients, which several scientists tried and failed, but within his lab. Injecting approximately 17,500 monkeys with the disease, he was finally able isolate the three viruses that caused polio and developed a vaccine for each that was able to prevent humans from getting Polio.
Today, people take the wellness and life span of diabetes patients for granted. Before 1969, the fear of severe Diabetes was much, much greater. According to the Nobel Prize Committee and Medical Doctor Andrew Dexter from UCLA, patients back then with sever diabetes were only spared a few more years by following extreme diets and undergoing constant pain. Luckily, two Nobel Prize winning scientist, Frederick G. Banting and John Macleod, discovered Insulin from experimenting on a dog with Diabetes and another dog without. By removing the pancreas, an organ that regulates sugar, of a dog, diabetes developed in the dog a week. However, when injecting the diabetic dog with a pancreatic formula, called insulin, extracted from the healthy dog, the diabetic dog lived a healthy life as long as it kept receiving the injection. This proved to be true in humans as well because patients who died from diabetes had a damaged pancreas. When Insulin was distributed throughout America to humans, patients with severe diabetes with only days to live recovered as long as they kept receiving their injections.
Unfortunately, scientists are unable to find a cure or treatment for every disease. Animal testing alone provides a huge potential for scientists to find a cure for today’s toughest diseases like AIDS. First off, scientists require thorough information on the virus before looking for a cure. Fortunately, this was made possible by examining similar immune deficiencies syndromes in mice, cats, and monkeys. One major understanding the AIDS Foundation discovered was that the AIDS virus is a retrovirus, meaning that it can only duplicate with a special enzyme, or “helper” chemical. The majority of mammals possess these similar enzymes, each producing a different disease similar to AIDS. By understanding how AIDS works from animal models, scientists have better chance to stop the AIDS virus from duplicating. Even though a vaccine is currently eluding us, animal testing s

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