Talk:Animal disease model

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I just added an external link to [1]. This site certainly contains information that can be incorporated in to the article so we can get rid of the "unknown Keesiewonder 00:33, 16 December 2006 (UTC)importance" tag.

Redundant to Animal testing?

I'm wondering if this article isn't redundant to Animal testing? Jobjörn (Talk ° contribs) 09:34, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

To me, it's not necessarily redundant, although I think it could be improved drammatically. In Animal testing I see the issue being more about, well, testing. Testing doesn't necessarily mean models. Animal testing can include testing the effects of cosmetics on animals, drugs on animals, anything on animals. Something is only a model if you're not really testing the "real" thing... So, you can test the effects of a drug on a rat's brain, but if you're trying to understand a disease like schizophrenia you can only model the disease because rats don't actually get schizophrenia. Ehb 01:58, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Reply

Animals can be tested on for a number of reasons such as testing of beauty products and determining the impact of zero gravity on health. Neither of these examples use an 'animal model'. An animal model refers to a strain of an animal that models a specific human disease. This strain may have developed naturally (e.g. by inbreeding - the non-obese diabetic NOD mouse that models diabetes) or have been designed by altering the function of a gene that in humans has been associated with a certain disease. Additionally, animal used in animal models tend to be fast-breeding organisms (e.g. mice) so that experiments can be repeated a number of times and taht data can be obtained relatively quickly. Rowan 01:32, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Rowan (above). Animal testing and animal models are very different. One is an activity, the other serves as a model to understand results from a particular experiment with a different species. --chodges 18:44, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Human Malaria Section

It seems to me that the section "Some scientific papers that use Plasmodium yoelii as a model of human malaria" is a very odd example, and does not contribute to the value of this article. Ehb 01:58, 22 February 2007 (UTC)