Animal research for ME

Not from my experience. There are about 100 different ways of 'reproducing' rheumatoid arthritis in rodents. But they told us nothing. The fact that you get arthritis after shoving avast quantity of tubercle bacteria into a paw tells us nothing about a human disease where that didn't happen.

Exploring without proving has a name - bad science, or otherwise boondoggling or paper-generating.

 

At least there's some observable pathology. In ME, we've no idea what the pathology looks like; until we do, we can't even know whether or not we've succeeded in creating a model.

 

Was that before or after we knew about the underlying mechanism for RA? If before, they could've slice and dice to figure out once they learn how to reproduce. RA may not be a good example though since you don't need to artificially reproduce in order to figure out the mechanism: you can see what's happening on the effected tissue. ME/CFS, on the other hand, could hugely benefit from it since we don't see anything. We are completely blind when it comes to ME/CFS.

I'll have to differ on that. Scientific method and scientific exploration are not the same thing. Not everything we do in science is the process of proving hypothesis. We need exploration to observe and form hypothesis. But, yes, it would be a bad science if you peddle exploration as a proof of something.

 

Clearly I am not qualified to take a strong view on the efficacy of animal models, but the point that has been made here is that there are qualified and competent people who do see value in animal studies. Qualified scientific viewpoints clearly vary.

I am mindful that there are many cases where popular views have turned out to be wrong - study proposals which were rejected which, when funded through other means, produced useful results. You will likely know of more such cases than me.

So from the perspective of funder policy, I don't see the benefit of fixed, dogmatic positions on such issues, especially when they are informed, I suspect, by somewhat inconsistent ethical arguments (our society accepts killing animals for food, but we reject killing for medical research?). Are we really in such a strong situation that we can make blanket policies to reject certain methodologies without evaluating the underlying proposals?

 

The problem is that the charity sector is the largest funder of medical research. In other disease areas, the charity sector tends to fund more exploratory studies which cannot get government funding.

What I want from a medical charity is a commitment to do whatever it takes to achieve a breakthrough.

There are people who do not wish to fund animal studies. a solution to this would be to set up ‘vegan funds’ which allow those who do not wish to fund animal studies to restrict the use of their funds. Restricted funds are common in the charity sector.

But, given the poor state of knowledge and research into ME, and the extent of suffering it causes, do we really have the luxury of ruling-out methodologies due to concerns of one, potentially small section (however vocal) of the community?

 

I think, @PeterW , if you got people to work in an experimental pathology lab for a week you would find that a lot more than just vegans would be appalled by the inhumanity of it. I personally could not stomach doing experiments in the end. I eat free range chicken and fish but not red meat, for other reasons.

And I suspect, as Trish says, that the decision is more pragmatic than dogmatic. If Charles Shepherd could see that an animal model study could genuinely make a major breakthrough he would almost certainly manage to convince MEA to make an exception. But if there was actually a good reason to think such a study would be useful it would probably get done by a group funded for that sort of thing anyway.

 

Doubtless there are people who would not stomach such studies. The same can be said about the working of an abattoir. But just as there are people who do slaughter, slice and package our chicken, there are people who can manage such animal work.

But we mustn’t look at such things in isolation - there have already been centuries of ongoing suffering caused by this disease. The flip side of ‘no animal testing’ may be ongoing human suffering.

The question is whether, as a community (not just one person in a small charity) it is really a reasonable decision to close off avenues of investigation (as multiple charities do) because we fear uncomfortable paths?

 

"Uncomfortable paths" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The less politically correct terminology would probably be "torture".

It's easy to look at animals as an outgroup to justify pursuing all available avenues of investigation.

Similarly, when it was easier to view ethnically different humans as an outgroup, we had situations like Unit 731, a horrific Japanese WWII-era human experimentation research lab, which probably did produce some medical insights that helped some people:

Society is advancing morally. 300 years ago, black people were less than white people in the Americas and could be tortured for economic progress. Today, that attitude is vanishing, but animals are still viewed as less than, although we're currently in the "abolitionist" stage of animal rights, with animal welfare groups and veganism gaining popularity.

And regarding veganism, which you brought up earlier as if it's a binary:

It's not. No one is abstaining from harming every single animal. Otherwise they couldn't buy a single thing, as supply chains are insanely complicated. Was the seat of the truck made of cow leather that delivered the plastic to the synthetic leather boot factory? They couldn't even walk outside for fear of stepping on a bug.

Someone who eats meat, but doesn't buy useless fur coats, is more "vegan" than someone that does.

It's a spectrum of what people are able to do and where the individuals feel the benefit-harm line is.

I think giving a mouse long covid, forcing it to swim to exhaustion in terror with no escape, then eventually suffocating it with a panic inducing gas, would easily fit on one side of the benefit-harm line, if one thinks an animal that can feel pain matters as much as a human that can feel pain. Which, if one doesn't, I think is a matter of convenience, because it allows the above to be justified.

 

The problem with this argument is that it ignores the pain, suffering and - if you want to use this language - torture that ME causes to people.

The pretense is that a blanket refusal to consider animal studies has no downsides.

The reality is that if such a policy delays significant discoveries, then it would extend the pain and suffering of large numbers of people with ME.

Those who make comfortable decisions around ethics can and should be challenged on the opportunity cost of those decisions.

 

More often, the pretence seems to be that we have a disease model of ME in humans that we can somehow replicate in non-humans.

We don't. There's nothing we can test in humans, animals, or computer simulations, because we have no idea what we're looking for.

That's the problem that really needs addressing.

 

It doesn't ignore it - it says if animal suffering is worse than the human suffering it would alleviate, it doesn't make logical or moral sense.

As I said earlier, and in the vein of the benefit-harm question, if it would take giving a mouse mild Long COVID to cure a human's severe LC, I wouldn't be as opposed to it (though it's still an ugly, nuanced scenario with making painful decisions for a mouse and there's the question of, then why not force humans to have mild LC instead, so I'm not sure. And you can't really "only" have the LC suffering. There's also the cramped cage, the invasive testing, the painful euthanasia, etc.)

But I don't think many people are weighing the above or considering the harm, and the animals are often suffering in huge numbers and to a much more significant degree than the benefit they'll provide to humans.

I'm not opposed to open discussion and research into these questions, including labs experimenting on animals also being challenged on the cost-benefit.

 

Whatever it takes? Do you mean that literally? Including torturing humans?

 

No, clearly I don’t mean “torturing humans”.

But that may mean consenting volunteers undertaking 2 day invasive CPETs, or trying therapies with significant side-effect profiles, or donating our bodies for post-mortem studies.

What I want to see from our charities is hard, driving ambition in ideating and funding research, just like Parkinson’s UK does for Parkinson’s disease, Cancer Research UK does for Cancers, the MND association does for MND etc.

 

As if one cue:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02010-7

Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London, is more sceptical. “Things like long COVID are really, really hard to reiterate in animal models,” he says, and it is unclear how well the symptoms observed in mice really reflect what’s going on in humans. “We’ve invested almost zero in building up those models,” he says, owing to a lack of government interest and “policymaker fatigue” in funding long COVID research. So even “if this study catalyses debate about the vacuum of small-animal models that are really holding back the field, I think it’s helpful”, he adds.

 

Some more thoughts on animals' capacity to suffer:

"Charles Darwin enjoys a near god-like status among scientists for his theory of evolution. But his ideas that animals are conscious in the same way humans are have long been shunned. Until now.

"There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery," Darwin wrote.

But his suggestion that animals think and feel was seen as scientific heresy among many, if not most animal behaviour experts.

Attributing consciousness to animals based on their responses was seen as a cardinal sin. The argument went that projecting human traits, feelings, and behaviours onto animals had no scientific basis and there was no way of testing what goes on in animals’ minds.

But if new evidence emerges of animals’ abilities to feel and process what is going on around them, could that mean they are, in fact, conscious?"

More here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv223z15mpmo

 

Anyone who's ever been owned by a cat knows they are conscious, and from that they should be capable of inferring that animals are, as a group, capable of feeling, scheming, manipulating, being annoyed, having their own distinct personalities, etc.

Animals being conscious, being aware of what's going on around them, and having awareness of their own needs, desires, and responses to that 'clearly' has an effect on their ability to plan the most likely way to survive, meet their desires, etc.

Speaking as an animal, I don't understand why anyone would think otherwise.

 

Here’s another interesting LongCovid study conducted in mice, identifying cross-reactivity with antibodies.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.18.24309100v1.full.pdf

 

Studies in mice or any other species other than humans nearly always give results which are not applicable in humans.

 

The study showed a difference between samples transferred from Healthy Controls and people with a specific set of LongCovid symptoms.

The study showed reactivity of antibodies from ppl with LongCovid, but not healthy controls, to mouse nervous tissue.

This supports a role of the immune system in creating LC symptoms.

I am not sure what part of this study you are specifically concerned about.