IT has been a busy time for those engaged in medical research, pulling out all the stops to entrench their particular dogma into the minds of the masses that animal experiments are necessary for medical progress.

Home Office spokeswoman Caroline Flint (Channel 4 News, August 4) meekly parroted the familiar rhetoric that "some of the images and some of the stories about animal research are wrong, some are out of date, and some didn't happen in this country", and accused opponents of scaremongering.

Believe me lady, no newspaper would print the real images, the real stories, for fear of the public outrage it would cause. Old images are as valid as recent ones in that they highlight the mentality of those who would experiment on hapless animals whether this year, 20 years ago, and in any country.

The Research Defence Society pompously claim that chimpanzees have not been used in this country "for decades", although Trevor Jones, director general of the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries (Moral Maze, Radio 4 last week) commented that "chimpanzees are still occasionally used"! Interestingly, six infant chimps were infected with incurable hepatitis C in a Dutch laboratory, all of them named after the EU cities sponsoring the research, places such as Lille, Stockholm . . . and Oxford!

A recent scientific review in the prestigious British Medical Journal (Where is the Evidence-Uncaged, July) by a team of international academics investigating the biological differences between animals and humans, concluded that "there is no adequate evidence that vivisecting animals is relevant to humans" . . . that is, they have no "predictive" value.

Therefore, basing human medicaments on results from animal tests must ensure that the first humans taking a new drug are the real guinea pigs and is pure speculation, therefore hazardous, and that those in clinical trials are playing Russian roulette with their lives (Big Issue, July 1998).

J. SHORTLAND