How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths
How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths
A new study links the vulture decline in India to deadly bacteria spread, causing about 500,000 deaths.
BBC: How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths 25 JUL 2024
More than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows.
By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal painkiller for cattle that is fatal to vultures. Birds that fed on carcasses of livestock treated with the drug suffered from kidney failure and died.
The unintentional decimation of these heavy, scavenging birds allowed deadly bacteria and infections to proliferate, leading to the deaths of about half a million people over five years, says the study published in the American Economic Association journal.
“Vultures are considered nature’s sanitation service because of the important role they play in removing dead animals that contain bacteria and pathogens from our environment - without them, disease can spread,” says the study’s co-author, Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy.
“Understanding the role vultures play in human health underscores the importance of protecting wildlife, and not just the cute and cuddly. They all have a job to do in our ecosystems that impacts our lives.”
The authors estimated that between 2000 and 2005, the loss of vultures caused around 100,000 additional human deaths annually, resulting in more than $69bn (£53bn) per year in mortality damages or the economic costs associated with premature deaths.
These deaths were due to the spread of disease and bacteria that vultures would have otherwise removed from the environment.
“The vulture collapse in India provides a particularly stark example of the type of hard-to-reverse and unpredictable costs to humans that can come from the loss of a species,” says Mr Sudarshan, an associate professor at the University of Warwick and co-author of the study.
It is amazing to see what a difference these birds most take for granted contribute to our success as a species.
Many find vultures to be creepy, but after learning about some of their amazing abilities and understanding why they've evolved to become what they are, they are superbly designed animals that excel at doing a very important job.
White-rumped vulture (Population loss since 2000: 98%)
Indian vulture (Population loss since 2000: 95%)
Red-headed vulture (Population loss since 2000: 91%)
Why the heck was cattle pain killer used so widely? What are they doing to the cows?!
This article has the best account of why its use was/is so widespread. Here are some select lines from the article:
The introduction of hybrid cows in India coincided with global trends of the chemicalization of agriculture, medicine, and veterinary science.
In the shadow of antibiotics, diclofenac, a common painkiller also for human use, has become a “blockbuster drug” in more-than-human medicine. High-yielding cows undergo relentless cycles of pregnancy by artificial insemination, birth, and lactation. In India, diclofenac was the drug of choice to treat the many pains of high-performance cows, among them mastitis, a painful inflammation of the udder.
Diclofenac is a cheap, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) and thus within the same class of pharmaceuticals as aspirin (ASS) or ibuprofen.
Diclofenac has been sold since 1973 under the brand name Voltaren as an over-the-counter remedy for arthritis pain in humans and domestic animals. With the end of patent protection, it has become one of the most widely used NSAIDs across the world, and its generics are available in India under a variety of brands.
Human and other mammalian bodies metabolize diclofenac and excrete it via the kidneys and the renal system. Healthy mammalian kidneys can deal with the drug reasonably well. To birds, however, diclofenac is a deadly toxin. Birds who ingest diclofenac die of severe renal failure as the effect of kidney necrosis.
Based on emerging evidence of avian kidney toxicity, scientific and political pressure led to the eventual ban of diclofenac for veterinary use in India in 2006. However, many veterinarians consider diclofenac so important for the care of milk cows that they continue to use the drug illegally by misappropriating drugs designated for human use only. Pharmaceutical companies played along by labeling the liquid 30 ml vials, popular among veterinarians injecting the drug, as multi-dosage preparations for human usage
Vultures and other carrion birds have been used by some cultures to eat human remains too. The bones are then interred, cremated or venerated. It's called sky burial. I always liked the idea. Giving back to nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposal_of_human_corpses#Sky_burial
(For some reason, the article just about sky burial mostly only talks about the Tibetan and Mongolian practice.)
Would be cool, but my body probably has a ton of shit that could kill the vultures just as the cows did.
I'm glad you guys still make me laugh even when I have to post depressing things! 😅
Maybe someone can look for it since I'm being lazy, but I coulda sworn I saw a piece around a decade ago about how sky burials were falling out of fashion in India/Nepal and it was impacting the vulture populations that partially depended on dead humans as a food source. Now I'm wondering if the issue was sky burials in decline or if it was poison in cattle -- or both.
Here's a good one from Al Jazeera.
7 Apr 2015
The massive decline in the vulture population across Mumbai and the entire Maharashtra state began from 1992-93 onwards when the Indian government opened this drug for use in livestock as well. Today, there is not a single vulture in the state, according to Rahmani.
“Diclofenac is lethal to vultures. It does not matter from where they get it, from a dead Parsi or from a dead cow,” Rahmani said.
As corpses take longer, sometimes eight weeks, to decompose fully, the tower of silence continues to be a scene of partially decomposed bodies.
This has pushed some of the Parsi elders to blend the ritual of “sky burials” with modern technology.
“For 800 deaths a year, we need at least 250 vultures. But since there are no vultures around, we’ve installed solar concentrators. I think that’s the only way out now,” Dinshaw Rusi Mehta, a member the Bombay Parsi Punchayet, told Al Jazeera.
Radiolab had a good episode on this and figuring out what was killing the vultures:
There was a 99pi episode on this somewhat recently. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/
Thanks for sharing this!
At first it was a lot of what was in this article and the one from Al Jazeera I shared in the other comment, but then it went on to describe the effect it's having on the Parsis and how the loss of the vultures is ending their religion due to them losing their land due to complaints from the vultures not being able to process the bodies.
It also ended with a note on how now there are adults now that have gone their whole lives without ever seeing a vulture. They hear their parents and grandparents talk about them in relation to their religion, but to the kids they are just another mythic beast like a leviathan, as they've never seen one. That's kind of mind blowing to me, and it's sad to think how many other animals our grandchildren might not remember in the future.
Really disheartening to see. I know when an animal dies out back in the woods or field because the vultures, while super fucking creepy, all chill up in the trees and take turns swooping down on the carcass. They pick it clean.
Vultures definitely have an unfair reputation, I don’t even think they are ever aggressive towards humans or really anything living.
Vultures are not typically aggressive. They don't have the speed and strong talons of other raptors. The great majority of their food is already dead when they eat it. If another predator shows up, they will usually get out of there.
Their look is unconventional, but they are largely designed the only way they can be. If we go by the philosophy of beauty being function over form, it becomes easier to appreciate them.
Their heads are typically bald to avoid parasites and pathogens they would get from sticking their heads inside of some gnarly spaces.
Their legs are also bare, and they wash them with their urea (urohydrosis) to keep them sterile as well, because those feet are also going in the same funk.
Vulture stomach acid also comes in between 0-1 pH, making it 100x as strong as ours. All that bacteria and any parasites are going to be nuked.
So they are basically living, regenerating bio hazard suits that can digest anything. They can eat things contaminated with anthrax and botulism without a care in the world.
Bonus fact: There is a Palm Nut Vulture eats nuts, fruit, and grain in addition to meat.
Bearded vultures are pretty neat too. They pretty much only eat bones. They can eat surprisingly big chunks whole. Or if the bone is too big, they drop it onto a rock to break it up.
And they're very peaceful, because they know no one is going to fight them for the bones.