Veterinary Drug Diclofenac Wiped Out 97% Of India's Vultures - So Let's Start Using It In Europe!!

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In the 1990s, three closely related species, the white-backed, slender-billed and long-billed vultures, suddenly started mysteriously dying in India, in their millions – indeed, in their tens of millions. Their populations collapsed nearly completely, with up to 97 per cent of their numbers disappearing, which has presented a serious social as well as environmental problem for the subcontinent.

While Western eyes may see them as scruffy and sordid, vultures have long played an important role in keeping Indian villages and towns clean by consuming cattle carcasses (cows are sacred and are traditionally left in the open when they die in their thousands every year). The birds’ vanishing has led to a boom in India’s population of feral dogs, feasting on the unwanted carrion, with a fears of a sharp rise in rabies – more people die from rabies every year in India than anywhere else; and the disappearance has also been traumatic for India’s Parsee community, who leave their dead on so-called “towers of silence” so they can be eaten by vultures in a “sky burial”, which in many areas can no longer take place.

For more than a decade, the vulture deaths were a complete mystery, with an unknown virus being the principal suspect; but in 2004 a team of American researchers showed that they had been killed by the residues in the cattle carcases of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug used to treat symptoms of disease and injury in domestic animals since the early 90s.

Since then, diclofenac has been banned for veterinary use in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, and the vultures’ slide to extinction has been halted (although recovery will take a very long time). But to the amazement of conservationists, the drug has recently been licensed for veterinary use in Europe, first in Italy and now in Spain, the country which holds the vast majority of Europe’s vultures; and in a further twist, diclofenac has just been shown to be fatal to eagles of the genus Aquila, to which both the Spanish imperial eagle and the golden eagle belong.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/nature-studies-the-drug-that-killed-indias-birds-of-prey-is-coming-to-europe--and-we-must-stop-it-9473483.html