By Kathy Archibald, director of the Safer Medicines Campaign:

THE Safer Medicines Campaign is an independent patient safety organisation of doctors and scientists whose concern is whether animal testing is more harmful than helpful to public health and safety.

Our goal is to protect human health by promoting human-specific medical research.

It is a cruel irony that side effects of prescription medicines designed to help us are now a leading cause of death, hospitalising a million Britons, killing more than 10,000 and costing the NHS £2 billion every year.

Drug disasters in the past prompted new laws to protect the public but today the Government accepts this vast pharmaceutical carnage as a fact of life.

One explanation for the poor safety record of so many drugs is the reliance on safety testing in animals. The Government insists all new drugs are shown to be safe in two species of animals before they can be given to humans. However, overwhelming evidence shows new technologies based on human biology are more accurate and reliable – they are also much faster and cheaper.

In the infamous "elephant man" clinical trial at Northwick Park Hospital in 2006, six young men were almost killed by a drug after it had been shown to be safe in monkeys – even at 500 times the dose given to the volunteers.

Since 2006, tests using human cells have been developed that can predict the terrible effects suffered by the volunteers, some- thing that has not been possible with animal tests.

Leading scientists agree the best model for human drug development is based on human beings, yet animal tests have never been compared with the latest human biology-based methods. Many MPs now agree it is time they were.

A cross-party group of MPs has launched the Safety Of Medicines Bill, which calls on the Government to compare animal tests and human biology-based methods, in order to determine which is the safer option for protecting patients.

If animal tests are superseded then patients, the NHS, pharmaceutical companies and laboratory animals will all benefit.

Brighton Pavilion MP Dr Caroline Lucas says: "More reliable methods will benefit everyone. A national strategy to replace outdated animal tests is urgently needed to improve the safety of medicines."

A comment from Dr Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes Of Health, says it all: "It's slow. It's expensive. We are not rats and we are not even other primates."

Indeed we are not – yet, as Safer Medicines patron, actor and thalidomider Mat Fraser points out: "Animal testing makes all of us guinea pigs."

We must move safety testing into the 21st century, for all our sakes.