However, the production of this drug has cost the lives of over a million horses.

Several medically sound alternatives now exist which completely avoid this slaughter and cruelty and are safer for the women who take them. "The cruel manner in which Premarin is produced is outdated and no longer necessary," said Equine Advocates' president, Susan Wagner. "With numerous medically recognized alternative choices for effectively treating menopausal symptoms, including synthetic estrogens, women now have the opportunity to end a fifty-eight year catastrophe for horses." UPDATE: See our section on Cenestin. Approved by the FDA in 1999, it has been dubbed "synthetic Premarin". Because of this latest development, we strongly believe that no horses should ever be used to produce estropgen replacement drugs again.

SECRETS, LIES & GREED

Since 1942, a drug called Premarin (pregnant mares' urine) has been prescribed by doctors to treat the symptoms of menopause in women. Premarin (conjugated estrogens) is extracted from the urine of pregnant mares (female horses).

Because so much of this drug is prescribed, its production requires the operation of around 700 "farms", in which around 80,000 horses live their entire lives penned in tiny stalls, unable to turn around or meaningfully lie down, deprived of water, repeatedly impregnated, and continuously connected to plumbing collecting that urine.

When they can no longer produce adequately, most are summarily slaughtered. Most of their offspring are either put in stalls or slaughtered. Over fifty-eight years of Premarin production, well over a million horses or perhaps millions of horses, have lived in cruelty and then been slaughtered. Only in the last twenty years has this dreadful secret become known at all.

Premarin is central to what is called "hormone replacement therapy" ("HRT"), although it replaces only estrogen, not progesterone or the other naturally occurring hormones whose levels drop after menopause. This makes any estrogen medically controversial.

Premarin is also controversial because the health risks to women of absorbing a substance made from equine waste may not be fully known. Further, Premarin is also said, even by its maker, to contain various unknown and unidentified substances.

All of these issues have been buried by Premarin's maker, Wyeth-Ayerst, a division of American Home Products, headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who have spent tremendous time and money to sell the notion that only Premarin can treat the symptoms of menopause. The practical monopoly Wyeth-Ayerst has achieved by avoiding these controversies and, at least so far, burying alternative medications brings Wyeth-Ayerst over $1 billion in revenues each year from sales of Premarin and other drugs (including Prempro, Premphase, and Prempac) made from pregnant mares' urine ("PMU").

As a whole new generation of women enters menopause, it is vital that they be allowed to make informed decisions about the drugs they should or should not take. This requires knowing what different drugs are available and, most specifically, how Premarin is produced.

click here for the next section: CYCLE OF CRUELTY

Equine Advocates, Inc. Permission to reprint MUST be requested - that includes for the Internet!