Richard Scrase, communication manager for Understanding Animal Research

I am 57 and I expect to die of cancer, heart disease or a stroke, but not infectious disease. That expectation is thanks to medical research that sometimes uses animals, research that has produced vaccines and antibiotics.

One of my colleagues has type 1 diabetes. He controls the condition with insulin, a compound originally found by research with dogs. Without insulin he would be dead within days.

Despite the many examples of medical research using animals that have led to improvements in health, some argue we should do without animal experiments.

They say that animals are not like us and the results from animals don’t apply to humans. But a mouse has a body plan and metabolism much like ours: two lungs, one four-chambered heart, almost identical enzymes controlling almost identical biochemical reactions.

Zebra fish are now used as an animal to understand human conditions, partly because they share 70 per cent of their genes with us and these include 84 per cent of human disease-causing genes.

The antis say we can rely on ‘alternatives’ such as computer models and tissue culture. I fully agree that these play a role and support additional funding to develop alternatives but a great deal of research is about discovering how biological systems work in the first place. You cannot simulate the unknown. We also need to know how a potential new medicine affects the whole body. You cannot do that in a petri dish.

In their rhetoric the antis also conveniently ignore the fact that it is illegal to use animals for research in this country if there is an alternative method available.

The antis accuse scientists of causing “millions of animals to suffer and die”. It is true that millions of animals die in research, but everything possible is done to keep suffering to a minimum. I have filmed and visited eight research facilities so far and have seen that animals are kept in very good conditions.

When an animal exhibits undue discomfort or starts to suffer old age, it is usually put down. If an experimental procedure causes pain, animals are given pain relief. Scientists are given licences from the Home Office before they can work with animals and these licences classify procedures as mild, moderate, severe or unclassified.

Out of around 2,700 licences given in 2012, 56 were severe and 43 unclassified. During unclassified procedures, the animal is placed under general anaesthetic before the start of the procedure, and is humanely killed without ever regaining consciousness.

But the majority of procedures are mild or moderate, such as having a blood sample taken.

While research with animals is mainly for medical purposes, research also aids animal conservation and animal welfare, eg developing badger vaccine against TB. All the veterinary medicines available today have been developed using animals.

Without animal research there would be little hope of developing treatments against nightmare diseases such as Ebola where early trials of a medicine based on mice antibodies and tested on monkeys look promising.

But for some reason some people think that laboratory animals are more important than wild animals, pets or people. This is a peculiar view that I still fail to understand.