Medicine, not disease, killing vultures !

New Delhi, June 18, 2003 : A commonly used pain killer may be the cause behind the large scale decline of vultures in the sub-continent.

At the ‘Sixth World Conference on Birds of Prey’, Dr. Lindsay Oaks of the Washington State University, shared with participating members the results of his study during the last two weeks. Like other researchers, he too had been looking for any virus or bacteria attacks and any other disease pathogen that could have been responsible for these deaths. Poisonous chemicals, pesticides, metals etc. also had been tested but this too proved to be a shot in the dark. It was then that Dr. Oaks tried to move his research in a different direction and started studying the food being consumed by the vultures. The American toxicologist made inquiries about the medicines being given to cattle and buffalos in India. He located a drug called Diclofenac, a medicine commonly used in India and Pakistan as a pain-reliever and an anti-inflammatory remedy for humans and animals. He found, to his surprise, that tissue samples of 23 vultures that had died of gout symptoms contained Diclofenac as against those that had no trace of the drug and had died of other causes. In yet another experiment, tissues from a dead vulture (whose tissues contained Diclofenac) were fed to other vultures and they too died in some time.

Dr. Oaks, whose work in Pakistan has been supported by the Peregrine Fund, seems to have come to the conclusion that since sick cattle and buffalos in India are usually treated with Diclofenac, it is their meat, which when fed to the vultures, acts as poison.

He has also stated that this drug is not used for livestock in USA or Europe but is used so liberally by people by traces of it have been found in surface waters of natural water bodies. Some of the other popular names the drug is known by are Diclovet, Combiflam, Voveran, Dicloran MS and Winofit.