AR-News: (India) vulture death mystery solved

[Mary Finelli]

Article summary from the 1/28 AnimalNet:


MYSTERY OF VULTURE DECLINE IN INDIA, PAKISTAN SOLVED AT LAST
Agence France Presse English, January 28, 2004

Paris - Scientists were cited as reporting in Thursday's issue of Nature 
they have figured out the baffling decline of vultures in Pakistan and 
India, declaring that vultures which feed on the carcasses of livestock 
recently given diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory widely used on the 
sub-continent, build up such levels of the drug that they suffer kidney 
failure.

The story says that experts have been struggling for years to explain a 
decline of more than 95 percent in the past decade of many populations of 
the Oriental white-backed vulture (Gyps bengalensis), a bird that pays a 
vital link in the food chain.

Once one of the commonest raptors on the Indian continent, the creature is 
now listed as critically endangered.

The researchers led by Lindsay Oaks, a veterinary microbiologist at 
Washington State University, linked high levels of diclofenac with death 
from visceral gout, a degenerative kidney disease, among 259 vultures they 
autopsied in Pakistan.

The team tested by their theory by feeding captive vultures the drug either 
directly or indirectly, using meat from the carcasses of buffaloes or goats 
that had been treated with it.

In both India and Pakistan, diclofenac is sold over the counter as a 
non-steroid painkiller for farm animals, and farmers in those countries 
often leave the carcasses of animals that die of disease or injury for 
scavengers to remove.

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