How did the near-extinction of vultures in India contribute to thousands of additional human deaths?

How did the rapid decline in the population of vultures in India affect human beings? A new study, published in the American Economic Review, says that because these birds went nearly extinct, India had about 500,000 additional deaths from the year 2000 to 2005 and the economic damages to the country amounted to about 69.4 billion dollars annually.

How did this happen? Up until the early 1990s, vultures were a familiar sight in India – estimates indicate the country had about 30 to 50 million vultures. In the 20 years following 1994 however, the vulture population has been decimated – only a few thousand now exist, and they are listed as a critically endangered species. What happened to them? Diclofenac, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, began to be used by farmers to treat their cattle. When vultures consumed, as they always do, the dead animals or carcasses that were treated with this drug, they began to die as this drug was poisonous to their systems. It took some years for the link between the drug and the vulture deaths to be established and the drug was eventually banned for animal use, but too late for the vultures of India.

So how did the loss of vultures affect the sanitation system of India? What happened to the carcasses of farm animals that were once effectively cleaned up by vultures? Did the population of dogs and rats increase because of the vulture deaths? And importantly, how did this contribute to human deaths?

Guest: Eyal Frank, assistant professor, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and co -author of the paper

Host: Zubeda Hamid

Edited by Jude Francis Weston

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