Help needed please on an article in the Guardian re the massive decline in some vulture species. Headline "Drug-treated livestock blamed for collapse of scavengers", the article goes on to say:
"Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug widely used for livestock in south Asia, is behind a catastrophic fall in three species of griffon vulture, scientists say.
The oriental white-backed vulture, the long-billed vulture and the slender-billed vulture are all in steep decline, their report today in the journal Nature says.
Twenty years ago the white-backed vulture existed in tens of millions, but in a little more than a decade the population crashed by 99%."
"Debbie Pain, of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said: "The decline is one of the steepest experienced ... faster than that of the dodo."
Lindsay Oaks of Washington State University, who led the study, said the find was the first known case of a pharmaceutical causing "major ecological damage over a huge geographic area".
My question is: Why is this drug used, and why so extensively; is it cheap (I imagined a lot of Asian farmers would not be sufficiently well off to afford widespread use of drugs)? Are drug-treated (dead) cattle the only, or main, food source for the vulture?
Alan Hill
"Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug widely used for livestock in south Asia, is behind a catastrophic fall in three species of griffon vulture, scientists say.
The oriental white-backed vulture, the long-billed vulture and the slender-billed vulture are all in steep decline, their report today in the journal Nature says.
Twenty years ago the white-backed vulture existed in tens of millions, but in a little more than a decade the population crashed by 99%."
"Debbie Pain, of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said: "The decline is one of the steepest experienced ... faster than that of the dodo."
Lindsay Oaks of Washington State University, who led the study, said the find was the first known case of a pharmaceutical causing "major ecological damage over a huge geographic area".
My question is: Why is this drug used, and why so extensively; is it cheap (I imagined a lot of Asian farmers would not be sufficiently well off to afford widespread use of drugs)? Are drug-treated (dead) cattle the only, or main, food source for the vulture?
Alan Hill
