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

Civilization Threat: Pollution

Humans have lived so happily ever since 200,000 years of their existence on this planet, until this last 250 years of short period which saw the sea through change in their life style. This extreme change is taking us to the door of our own doom. Our bodies have become the store house of pollutants mixed in air, water and food and the results: we are living with life threatening diseases. 

Still we have time only if awaken to the threat on our door, knocking one last time, for grasping opportunity to save our own survival on this beautiful blue planet of ours !!

200,000 years of human existence of peace & happiness

Humans (Homo sapiens) are primates of the family Hominidae, and the only living species of the genus Homo. They originated in Africa, where they reached anatomical modernity about 200,000 years ago and began to exhibit full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago.

^{This was the period when human lived with his basic needs and  happiness.}

Earliest Civilizations

The four earliest civilizations - Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese - arose between c. 3100 B.C. and c. 1500 B.C., in each case in the valley of a great river system. 

If you have willed to watch India thousands years back, Lothal is perfect place for you. It is the first Indian port of Indus valley Civilization between 1800-2400 B.C. it shows the knowledge of the ancient India about town planning. Research says that Indian subcontinent made trades with Egypt, Persia and Mesopotamia from this place. Discovery and research also says that it may be usual to have two bodies in single grave as researchers found three such graves here. Apart from this, 4000 years old seals of Indus valley, terracotta items and other ancient stone jewellery had also been found at this place.

                                          

Last 250 years journey of bad and ugly

In documented history of humans, it's about 250 years of time in total, when they set their foot in a period called the Industrial Revolution, where changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural condition of the times. It began in the United Kingdom, then subsequently spread throughout Western Europe, North America, Japan, and eventually the rest of the world. 

                                                    

                                                  

The Era of Sustainability: The Next Revolution

Looking back at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it is difficult to realize how and what took place then is having such complicated and vast effects today. This is the principle of environmental unity – a change in one system will cause changes in others. Certainly, the seeds of progress – and the ramifications of that progress – were planted then. And with the very same mechanisms and effects that brought about both the progress and the indelibly connected results of that progress to our ecology – the good, the bad and the ugly – over the last 250 years, we are entering a new era of sustainability. 

Human body tissue (adipose); the storage ground for toxins

# Fat, also known as adipose tissue, isn't just sitting there on your hips. (Or jiggling there on your hips. Whatever.) "Adipose tissue is a complex, essential, and highly active metabolic and endocrine organ."

# Because most of environmental chemicals, called estrogen disruptors or xenoestrogens, are toxic and estrogen/antiandrogen active, they can disregulate hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis potentially inducing reproductive disorders.

#... the obese tend to have increased organochlorine concentrations compared to lean individuals. During body weight loss, a decrease in fat mass results in lipid mobilization, and organochlorine concentrations increase both in plasma and remaining adipose tissue.

# Our foods contain various chemicals (e.g. pesticides) that are fat soluble.... losing fat (weight) too quickly will flush lots of toxic chemicals into our bloodstream -- too fast for our bodies to effectively eliminate.

colored scanning electron micrograph of fat tissue

An alarming Report
Once upon a time, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted a program called the National Human Adipose Tissue Survey (NHATS). In 1982 and again in 1987 it analyzed human fat samples from cadavers obtained throughout the country, looking for the types of toxins that accumulate in human fat. Four industrial solvents and one dioxin were found in 100 percent of the fat samples⁶. Nine more chemicals, including three more dioxins and one furan were found in more than 90 percent of the fat samples. In general, 83 percent of the fat samples contained PCBs. U.S. researchers have confirmed the presence of multiple toxins in human fat⁷ associated with obesity risk. The EPA has confirmed the presence of these chemicals as pollution in the farm soil across America .

Overview of main health effects on humans from some common types of pollution.

(pic courtesy share)

Points to ponder: 
1. The result of life style: We expect our bodies to accept all sort of life style so easily. We never think that's not possible without a resistance.  

In fact, the way or body opposes the artificial and modern lifestyle is  - heart, asthma and cancer like serious diseases.

2. Risk for heart: Heart disease is primarily due to our diet. Once we eat fried food, then this oxidized oil releases free radicals in to our blood vessels, which not only causes heart disease but may be our whole body is at risk.
3. Water pollution is a serious problem: Major source of water pollution is industrial waste and  city sewage which is carried directly into rivers, agricultural and industrial products adds to the problem. Polluted water causes many serious diseases like cholera, diarrhea, tuberculosis and enteric infections.
4. Free radicals are dangerous: Dangerous factors of pollutants present in the body are the free radicals.(A free radical is any molecule that has an odd number of electrons. Free radicals, which can occur in both organic (i.e., quinones) and inorganic molecules (i.e., O(2)), are highly reactive and, therefore, transient. Free radicals are generated in vivo as by products of normal metabolism. They are also produced when an organism is exposed to ionizing radiation, to drugs capable of redox cycling, or to xenobiotics that can form free radical metabolites in situ. Cellular targets at risk from free radical damage depend on the nature of the radical and its site of generation.)

 They increases with increasing pollutants in the body and can cause trouble. Free radicals are the cause of diseases like heart, cancer, gout, diabetes, cataract. These not only make us sick, but also accelerate the aging process.

5. Greater risk of air pollution: As compared to non-industrialized areas, the industrialized places are having much higher increasing trends of diseases like various types of cancer, skin ailments, birth defects and chromosomal inequality. Pulmonary, digestive, blood pressure and infectious diseases have increased manifold.


*Note: pics thankfully shared from various sources.