“The proper study of mankind is man,” wrote Alexander Pope in 1734. His words have become something of a maxim for the animal rights movement. Where anti- vivisectionists would once argue that animal experiments are unjustified, regardless of any medical benefit, many now contend instead that such benefits are illusory and the experiments worthless.

Rats and guinea-pigs, they say, are not a good guide to human physiology. Thousands of human lives are lost to drug side-effects that were missed in animal tests. The only appropriate models for studying people are people, and vivisection is a harmful and costly red herring.

Such arguments are the staple fare of Europeans for Medical Progress (EMP), which proclaims itself to be a patient advocacy group interested in improving medicine. “We oppose animal experimentation because it directly harms humans and because it diverts funds from useful research methods,” it says. Its concern is not supposed to be animals’ suffering, but that of people.

Unfortunately, it supports this view by playing fast and loose with the evidence. This week, the Advertising Standards Authority upheld five complaints against Our Children’s Health?, an EMP leaflet that was an outlandish example of dubious hyperbole masquerading as scientific fact.

The watchdog could not have reached any other verdict. The EMP’s assertions that vivisection is “the biggest obstacle in the search for cures for cancer”, and that “children (and adults) are dying every day because precious funding is wasted on studying animals” are without scientific foundation. Others are disingenuous; the claim that improved therapies for childhood leukaemia have emerged from non-animal methods is technically correct, but this research was in the 1950s. More recent advances have involved animals.

The most pernicious contention of the lot is that “misleading results from animal experiments have proved tragic or fatal when applied to children and babies”. This fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of animal research.

Animal activists like to quote adverse drug reactions as if they are trump cards. The logic goes like this: drug side effects sometimes kill; all drugs are tested on animals, therefore animal experiments are deadly. This is a non sequitur. That one event occurs after another does not mean it happens because of it.

It is true that animals are imperfect models for humans, and that dangerous errors would result if they were relied on in isolation for medical testing — which is why that never happens. Animal experiments are performed early in research for two chief purposes. They help scientists to understand basic biological processes that can inform the design of therapies, and then they are used in preliminary toxicity tests.

The key word is preliminary. Before a drug reaches the market, it must pass through three stages of clinical trials on humans, each one more rigorous and involving more patients than the last. The relatively small animal studies are designed to assess potentially damaging effects on a living body before a decision is taken to move to the first human safety trials.

Checking out probable problems before moving on to human tests is important. But when it comes to the decision to grant a drug a licence, it is the stage three trial involving thousands of volunteers that really matters. The results of animal tests are the equivalent of GCSEs, essential to move on to the next level but of little consequence to an employer looking at a 40-year-old’s CV.

There is room for legitimate debate about whether animal research is ethical, or even whether it is always the best way of making medically significant discoveries. Baseless assertions about death and suffering, however, only confuse the issue. It is gratifying to see them dismissed by an independent body like the ASA.

Mark Henderson is the Times science correspondent

Explore Health News

• Swine flu

Times Recommends

• Milk: do we need a dairy godmother?
• DIY: the women doing it for themselves
• First double portrait of Princes unveiled