Pollution threat: Vanishing vultures

People talk much about the pollution 
by traffic-fuel-emissions, noises and plastic......

Hardly they are aware that medicines, 
chemical products of many sort 
and new techniques 
are also causing pollution to the extent of human catastrophe at large !!

India looking for an eco-catastrophe:
In last few decades, 90% of vultures in India are dead. 

After reading an article*, it came to mind with a shock that I haven't seen vultures in last many years.

Condor flights and early civilizations: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

We have been listening about this since last many years, but after reading about vultures, I realized the vast stage been set for this catastrophe, vast yet so hidden, as no one notices it often.

Just read this article and think about our kids and their tomorrow: vultures are dying today, the younger generation feeding on these meats....their tomorrow shall bring a future of unpredictable diseases.

Vanishing vultures in India: Biologists from all over the country confirmed that the three dominant species of South Asian vultures—slender-billed (Gyps tenuerostris), white-backed (Gyps bengalensis), and long-billed (Gyps indicus)—were dying across the region. 

By 2000, the World Conservation Union classified all three species as critically endangered, the highest risk category, and the Indian scientific community called out to their international colleagues to help identify the cause of the crash. Initial speculation centered on an infectious disease or bioaccumulation of pesticides, similar to the devastating effects of DDT on predatory birds a half-century earlier in Europe and North America.

Indian vultures

 But it was an American, Lindsay Oaks, a microbiologist at Washington State University working in collaboration with the US-based Peregrine Fund, who finally isolated the cause of the collapse in April 2003 and published the results the following year in Nature. The three species of Gyps vultures were dying from ingesting livestock carcasses treated with diclofenac, a mild painkiller akin to aspirin or ibuprofen. 

2-(2-(2,6-dichlorophenylamino)phenyl)acetic acid Cl
picture courtesy: wikipedia.org

picture courtesy: wikipedia.org

After taking it themselves for decades, Indians began using it in the early 1990s to ease the aches of their farm animals' cracked hooves and swollen udders. For reasons that remain unknown, vultures that feed on animals treated with diclofenac develop visceral gout—untreatable kidney failure that causes a crystallized bloom across their internal organs. Death occurs within weeks.

  

Thus, vulture numbers in the region had plummeted by 97 percent—the most catastrophic avian population decline since buckshot wiped out the passenger pigeon.

 No longer a mystery, the vanishing of India's vultures now presents a still greater challenge. India must find a way to restore its prime scavenger or risk untold human health consequences. Vultures once rid the landscape of diseases such as tuberculosis, brucellosis, and foot-and-mouth. Their strong stomach acids and high body temperatures allow them to ingest an anthrax-infected carcass and suffer no ill effects. The fear is that with vultures gone, and the human handling of dead livestock increasing, that these diseases could spread among both animal and human populations.

 *Meera Subramanian’s article in VQR of spring 2011 issue outlines the problem in much researched way; Can the world's fastest growing nation restore its prime scavenger before there are untold human consequences?

Pollution all around: Indian cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore are having their populace with increasing number of Asthama, cough and allergy cases every year on. 

How can a medicine could cure a disease due to man-made pollution. Now how can a doctor could suggest some patient to visit a village or a hill station for a healthy pollution free climatic change, after the medication.

Air pollution

100,000,000 tons of waste is collected every year in Indian cities. Only 60% is collected, rest 40% is burnt there itself. Some of the waste is used for the land-fill is also burnt there. 50% of the farming land of India is fast loosing the upper fertile crust, 70% of the river water is polluted, India is first in the world in air-pollution.

Indian pollution graphic scenario as by 2004

Economic development, liberalization, foreign multi national companies have resulted in new kind of one-time hybrid/gene altered seeds, new fertilizers, new insecticides....adding to the

Plastics are the menace

pollution menace of land and water to a new level of danger....resulting the mass suicide of farmers in India.

Deadly effects of antibiotics and hormones: While we eat meat, we presume that our body is getting better nutritional food. But, where from  these fish and meats are coming to....? 

These days most of the chicken birds are Broiler chicken, they are born in a cage, grown there itself, fed specially prepared food and in a three months of time a young bird get ready to be served  on our dining table. These are the 'chicken factories' where hundreds of thousand chickens are getting ready every day. Their cost is also kept in a normal range so that most people could afford to purchase them. As hundreds of thousand birds are kept together in a common cage, it's easy to manage them with the prepared feeds, but danger of infectious disease looms at large. So antibiotics and hormones are administered frequently, which makes them bigger and fattier beside protecting them from diseases. Higher the weight of animal, higher shall be the profit.

The meat industry could well be called meat factories which relies on antibiotics, arsenic, pesticides, hormones of various kinds to get maximum output in shorter span of time.

Antibiotics, arsenic, pesticides, and hormones are many other organic compounds which are used in animal feeding operations and may pose risks if they enter the environment. For example, chronic toxicity may result from low-level discharges of antibiotics and pesticides. Estrogen hormones have been implicated in the reduction in sperm counts among Western men (Sharpe and Skakkebaek, 1993) and reproductive disorders in a variety of wildlife (Colburn et al., 1993). Other sources of antibiotics and hormones include municipal waste waters, septic tank leachate, and runoff from land-applied sewage sludge. Sources of pesticides include crop runoff and urban runoff.

Little information is available regarding the concentrations of these compounds in animal wastes, or their fate/transport behavior and bioavailability in waste-amended soils. These compounds may reach surface waters via runoff from land-application sites.

Environmental and water pollution, chemicals and insecticides mixed in food, altered seeds and crops.

These are the changes happening below the ground, invisible from outside, but grazing our future like a big monster....to which we ourselves  have created like the one, Frankenstein. 

Vegetarian food is more nutritional with no Cholesterol and Fat. Cancer possibilities is less by 40%. Non-vegetarians are 9 times more susceptible for obesity. Soya, milk, cereals, fruits, vegetables, almond, juice fulfills our daily requirement of Vitamins, Calcium, Folic  Acid and Proteins; protecting from infections like common Flu.

Politicians and industrialists are selling future for the sake of man-made-money or due to ignorance in the name of development and modernization; but this devil shall not spare them too. 

As they have to breathe in the same air and eat food grown in the same soil. 

Acknowledgements: 

1. *Meera Subramanian, VQR of spring 2011

2. Sunil Deepak, Nav Bharat, Chhattisgarh,17 Feb 2013

3. American Geophysical Union survey of Indian pollution 

4. Wikipedia.org 

#Chicken lovers beware: Breeders in India use antibiotics to make birds fatter !! http://www.firstpost.com/living/chicken-lovers-beware-breeders-in-india-use-antibiotics-to-make-birds-fatter-1642335.html