Another incident occurred in 1993 that went unnoticed. The patent on a 20-year-old drug expired. This drug was common. Pain reliever Diclofenac is found in products like Volini, Voveran etc. Until 1993, its supply was controlled by the Swiss Pharma The firm Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), but after the patent expired, generic production began. Prices fell everywhere. For example, in Sri Lanka generic diclofenac The branded product was priced at Rs 8 in August 1995, whereas now it is priced at Rs 1.
Start using livestock
The same thing happened in India. Eventually, Indian generic manufacturers were driving down the price of diclofenac. As a result, diclofenac became common for veterinary use in 1994. Farmers began using it to treat “injuries, inflammation and fever in injured or sick animals.” This made sense because diclofenac was cheap, readily available and worked within 15 minutes.
Vultures annihilation
But then, something else happened that no one had imagined. Indian vultures started dying in large numbers. By the time the vultures established relationships, Deaths And by the time diclofenac was discovered in the animal carcasses, it was too late. India’s vulture population was nearly wiped out. From around 40 million in the early 1990s, vultures became rare by the early 2000s.
But that’s an old story. Now, a new report from researchers Eyal candid and infinity Sudarshan They claim that the lack of vultures has indirectly caused the deaths of millions of people.
Loss of 70 billion dollars every year
In their paper titled ‘Social costs of the decline of a keystone species: Evidence from the decline of vultures in India’, Frank and Sudarshan state: “The functional extinction of vultures… increased human mortality by more than 4%.”
This may not seem like a huge change, but we are talking about human lives here, not car mileage. If 100,000 people die each year in a country, a 4% change means 4,000 extra deaths. The researchers claim that between 2000 and 2005 there were “an average of 104,386 extra deaths each year”. They also estimated the economic losses to the country from these extra deaths: about $70 billion per year.
The basis of the environment
Humans drove cheetahs to the brink of extinction and tigers to the brink of extinction without suffering serious consequences. So, why did the near-extinction of vultures prove so damaging? The answer to this question lies in the word ‘keystone’ in the title of Frank and Sudarshan’s paper. They describe vultures as a keystone species because “if they are removed, the impacts on the ecosystem could potentially be large”.
This is no exaggeration. For a moment, go back to Carter’s photograph of the Sudanese child. Why was the vulture waiting for him to die? The answer is: vultures have evolved as scavengers rather than predators, although sometimes you hear rumors of them killing animals.
When it comes to scavenging, they are unrivalled. Frank and Sudarshan say a flock of vultures – the exact word is ‘committee’ – can reduce a 385kg cow carcass to bones in 40 minutes. Dogs and rats scavenge too, but they are not as efficient. They leave a lot of flesh on the bones to rot, and the dogs themselves spread rabies.
sanitary flying squad
So, for thousands of years, vultures have shouldered the municipal garbage-picking job in India’s cities and villages. Farmers would raise animals and when the animals died, the vultures would immediately take care of their carcasses. India has always had a huge livestock population – 500 million according to the 2019 livestock census – and the report estimates that by 1993, India’s 40 million vultures may have eaten meat equivalent to the weight of 27 million cows in a year. That’s 10.4 billion kilos of meat.
By removing millions of tons of carrion from the environment, vultures not only prevented the spread of germs but also curbed the numbers of other scavengers, such as rats and feral dogs, which spread the deadly rabies virus.
Frank and Sudarshan say that as vulture populations declined, ‘animal landfills’ began to emerge outside cities and villages. Burying carcasses deep in the ground or burning them was expensive, so they were dumped “on the outskirts of population centers across India.” Sometimes, carcasses were dumped in water, or the fluids released from their rotting bodies flowed into water bodies.
Apparent increase in deaths
Frank and Sudarshan carefully examined mortality rates before and after vulture population declines. For their analysis, they separately studied areas that originally had large vulture populations, and those that did not. The data showed that areas that were unsuitable for vultures had slightly higher mortality rates between 1988 and 1993 (1.2 additional deaths per 1,000 people).
The researchers suggest this may have been because areas with fewer vultures – which were colder and drier places – had problems with carcasses decaying, leading to disease and death.
But when vulture numbers declined dramatically in 1996, mortality rates in areas that had always had high vulture populations increased by “0.65 deaths per 1,000 people.” By 2005, this difference had increased to 1.4 additional deaths per 1,000 people.
And this “sanitation shock” caused by the disappearance of vultures was felt more strongly in urban areas, where there were no vast open spaces for carcass disposal. Also, their “significantly higher population density, and networked infrastructure such as drains that allowed pathogens and waste to spread rapidly” made the situation worse. “We found that urban areas had a larger increase in mortality than the combined sample,” say Frank and Sudarshan.
The threat of stray dogs
Dog bites and rabies are a huge problem in India. On July 30, the government told parliament that there would be 3 million dog bite cases in 2023 and that 4.7 million rabies vaccines had been administered. Yet 286 people died.
The study shows that while the vulture population in India declined, the dog population multiplied. The same dead animals carefully removed by the vultures were now available for the dogs to eat. And unlike vultures, dogs reproduce rapidly.
Frank and Sudarshan attribute the surge in demand for rabies vaccines after 1996 to a sharp increase in dog numbers following a decline in the vulture population.
