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.'