Bovine drug is still killing vultures - ecological crisis looms
Two years after scientists discovered that plummeting numbers of vultures in South Asia were due to a drug used to treat cattle, the chemical is still in use and continues to kill the birds at an alarming rate, conservationists warn.
India's National Board of Wildlife recommended a ban on diclofenac in March last year, a year after the drug was identified as the cause of a 97 per cent decline in vulture numbers in the previous 10 years.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh immediately endorsed the government-affiliated board's recommendation to phase out the veterinary use of the drug - used to treat inflammation in cattle - by last September.
But conservationists said the ban was being ignored.
'The government action plan of a total ban of the drug has failed miserably. Government-run veterinary hospitals are stocking and using diclofenac even six months after the total ban [on diclofenac] came into force,' said Kushal Mookherjee, a vulture expert working with Prakriti Sansad, a Calcutta-based NGO in the field.
Another conservationist, Shahenshah Jehangir, said: 'The incredibly rapid decline of these scavenger birds is fast leading us to a big ecological disaster. At this point in a war footing we should take action to save the vultures who hold a critical position in the food chain and are renowned for their ceaseless scavenging.'
The dramatic fall in vulture numbers - from 50 million in the beginning of the 1990s to about 1 per cent of that figure today - has caused an explosion in the population of feral dogs which have moved into areas no longer scavenged by vultures.
'In the absence of vultures, rotting carcasses are spreading diseases such as foot-and-mouth. Also, after eating rotting flesh many dogs are turning rabid and they are often attacking people. It has spawned another serious problem in a country where 30,000 people die from rabies every year,' said Mumbai health officer Dileep Joglekar.
'No other [scavenging] animals or birds can match the scavenging skills of vultures. None can clean the bones [of dead animals] as perfectly and as fast as vultures can.'
British biologist Rhys Green, of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the University of Cambridge, said: 'Time is running out. If we are to save these species [of vultures], governments, drug companies, vets, livestock owners and conservationists should act together now.'
