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2 days ago
- Health
- Scroll.in
Vulture population dwindles despite drug ban
Amid the diverse forests of southern India, across Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, a silent crisis is unfolding, threatening the survival of nature's most efficient scavengers: vultures. A synchronised vulture survey conducted across Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka in February 2025 estimated 390 vultures. While this is higher than the previous year's estimate of 320 vultures, it is still significantly less than historical populations. The survey recorded 157 vultures in Tamil Nadu – the white-rumped vulture (110), long-billed vulture (31) red-headed vulture (11) and the Egyptian vulture (5). According to the IUCN Red List, the first three are critically endangered, while the latter is endangered. The root cause for the decline in vultures in India has been the pharmaceutical drug known as diclofenac, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, or NSAID, used to treat cattle. Vultures that ingest diclofenac residues from the carcasses of treated cattle face severe health complications such as renal failure and even death, leading to catastrophic declines in their populations. The drop in vulture population in India, due to the impacts of diclofenac resulted in the government banning the drug for veterinary use in 2006. Other similar drugs, such as aceclofenac, ketoprofen and nimesulide, were also found to be fatally toxic and subsequently banned. 'These banned NSAIDs work miraculously on cattle, relieving pain and inflammation almost immediately, as their half-life – the time it takes for 50% of the drug to metabolise and take effect – is the shortest and fastest,' says K Vijayakumar, a veterinary doctor from Erode, a city in Tamil Nadu. 'However, these drugs often lead to renal failure [in vultures] due to a spike in uric acid levels after ingestion. Vultures are not biologically equipped to handle such elevated levels of uric acid, resulting in kidney failure and ultimately death.' 'If a group of vultures feeds on one such carcass, the whole group may die, not immediately, but somewhere else, unnoticed,' explains Rajkumar Devaraje Urs, Managing trustee of Wildlife Conservation Foundation, Mysore. Despite the bans on these harmful drugs, they continue to slip through the cracks of enforcement, quietly decimating vulture populations across India. A ban ignored After the 2006 ban on veterinary use, diclofenac continued to be sold in large multi-dose vials (30 ml) for human use. This facilitated the illegal use of diclofenac on cattle, contributing to a further decline in vulture populations. In response, the India's health ministry issued a blanket ban on multi-dose vials of diclofenac on July 17, 2015. Though a pharmaceutical company challenged this ban, the Madras High Court upheld the ban in 2017. In some places, this ban is being followed strictly. In the Nilgiris, for example, a pharmacist, on condition of anonymity as he is speaking on a sensitive topic, confirms that most retail stores now refuse to sell diclofenac without prescriptions, even for human use. 'We have put up boards clearly stating the drugs sold here are for human use only,' he says. 'Whenever a farmer approaches our shop for veterinary care, we direct them to veterinary doctors for correct diagnosis and treatment.' He adds that it has become nearly impossible to source any of the banned drugs especially in the Nilgiris. 'Diclofenac, in particular, is no longer supplied to us by wholesale distributors – even for human use,' he says. But this is not true across all regions. Rajkumar points out that large multi-dose vials remain widely available and are still being misused in rural areas for treating livestock, bypassing prescription requirements. S Bharathidasan, co-founder and secretary of the non-governmental organisation Arulagam based in Coimbatore, who actively works on vulture conservation, also says that vials of the drug, some dated as recently as 2022, are still available in the market despite the ban, particularly in places like MM Hills and Gundlupet, which fall outside the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve. 'From 2016 to 2021, 104 cases were filed for misuse of diclofenac for veterinary purposes, and nearly all resulted in convictions and a few are yet to receive the final judgement,' says MN Sreedhar, Director of Drugs Control, Tamil Nadu. He emphasises that the situation is currently under control and that enforcement actions in one region often have a deterrent effect elsewhere. He mentioned that the department has been particularly vigilant in districts like Coimbatore, Erode, Tiruppur, and Namakkal, based on the advice of Supriya Sahu, the Additional Chief Secretary for Tamil Nadu's Environment, Climate Change and Forests Department. 'In Coimbatore, two licenses have already been cancelled, and five cases are under investigation, with show-cause notices issued. Depending on the response and severity of violations, decisions are made to either suspend or cancel licenses,' he says. IMAGE Egyptian vulture circle over carcasses of livestock at a garbage dump. Credit: Sarusscape via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Unregulated veterinary practices According to Rajkumar, under-resourced veterinary departments exacerbate the misuse of diclofenac. 'As they are unable to attend to every call, retired personnel or untrained assistants step in,' he notes. Vijayakumar adds that cattle inseminators and other non-qualified personnel often act as de facto veterinarians in rural areas, prescribing over-the-counter medications without any formal training. 'These untrained individuals dispense veterinary drugs indiscriminately, with no understanding of correct dosages, side effects, or knowledge of bans on certain drugs,' he explains. He says that, in some cases, even farmers buy and administer medicines themselves – sometimes in doses exceeding lethal limits – to avoid paying a veterinarian's fee. 'Good practitioners avoid unnecessary drugs when natural remedies could suffice. But what we see on the ground is alarming – quacks administering lethal doses, often continuing treatment for days just based on a cow's visible pain, without proper diagnosis,' he says. Even a slight overdose, just 30 ml extra, can cause fatal side effects like bloody diarrhea in cattle. 'We can't always weigh cows accurately, which adds to the risk,' Vijayakumar explains. 'Farmers and quacks often don't even know about vultures, let alone the indirect impact of these drugs. Education and awareness are urgently needed, along with strict government intervention to regulate the use of veterinary medicine.' Bharathidasan suggests that veterinary care should be brought under the government. 'The Tamil Nadu government should make veterinary doctors widely available on call at an affordable cost. This approach would simplify the complex issues of quackery and illegal drug use,' he says. Additionally, he suggests that maintaining a detailed history of each cattle would allow for tracking administered medications, offering vital insights into the cause of the animal's death and helping to determine the appropriate disposal method. Multi-pronged approach In a significant move for vulture conservation, Tamil Nadu has restricted the use of the veterinary drug flunixin in 2019 and is working on establishing a Vulture Safe Zone across Coimbatore, Nilgiris, and Erode districts. 'While state governments lack the authority to impose a complete ban on pharmaceuticals, Tamil Nadu has taken decisive action by limiting the sale and purchase of the drug within its jurisdiction,' notes Bharathidasan. The state had earlier curbed the use of another harmful drug, ketoprofen, in 2015, well before the national government enforced a nationwide ban in 2023. 'At this stage, only ethical campaigning is possible. A nationwide ban issued by the Drugs Technical Advisory Board of India is essential to give it the force of law,' says Bharathidasan. But, he says, bans on anti-inflammatory drugs alone will not help vultures recover. The problem requires a multipronged approach. Rajkumar and his team are collecting field evidence and working with farmers, veterinarians, and wildlife departments to build awareness and demand accountability. Rajkumar notes that even among educated village residents, there is confusion about what vultures look like. 'Many think eagles are vultures because they've never seen a real vulture,' he says. When he visited schools, even teachers had never encountered one to teach the students. 'We show Ramayan's Jatayu to the villagers to save the vulture population. There is almost immediate attention to the issue when they can connect it with their belief system,' he shares. The team is also promoting ethno-veterinary practices, including traditional methods of animal treatment, such as the use of Ayurvedic medicines that they used before the introduction of the banned/restricted drugs. This is being piloted in five villages in Karnataka, he adds. Additionally, Bharathidasan feels the government should establish a proper animal carcass disposal mechanism. He points to the growing issue of animal poisoning, where wild animals or birds unintentionally consume substances intended for peacocks, street dogs, and similar animals. These poisoned wild animals are then eaten by scavengers, triggering a chain of poisoning resulting in the death of vultures, which in turn increases the burden of carcass disposal. 'Vultures are nature's clean-up crew. Their absence forces communities to dispose of dead cattle at high cost, or worse, send carcasses to meat industries, exposing other animals and humans to contamination,' he says. Conserving vultures, he notes, is not just about saving one species; it plays a critical role in sustaining the entire scavenger chain. Despite their critical ecological role, vultures reproduce slowly, with pairs breeding once a year and taking up to four years to mature. 'With other threats like electrocution, windmill collisions, animal poisoning, and food scarcity due to industrial meat practices, every vulture lost is a significant blow,' says Bharathidasan.
NBC News
09-04-2025
- Business
- NBC News
The U.S. and China are copying each other, giving rise to memes and mockery
President Donald Trump wants to bring back American manufacturing in ways that would reshape the United States economy to look more like China's. The campaign, which has led to a rapidly escalating trade war with China, has given ample social media fodder to Chinese and American observers alike. Announcing a series of sweeping tariffs in a move dubbed 'Liberation Day,' Trump said last week that this will lead factories to move production back to American shores, boosting the U.S. economy after 'foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream.' In a Truth Social post Wednesday, Trump announced that he is raising tariffs on goods imported from China to 125%, up from the 104% that took effect the same day, due to 'the lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets.' Meme-makers and Chinese government officials have in recent days begun pointing out the irony of Trump's tariff-driven manufacturing pivot through AI-generated satire and political cartoons that have percolated online, with many American users boosting the jokes. One video poking fun at the Trump administration's attempted pivot to American manufacturing has accumulated millions of views on X since a user posted it on TikTok earlier this week. The clip, seemingly generated with artificial intelligence, showed workers sewing garments and assembling mobile devices in a factory, followed by a screen touting: 'Make America Great Again.' Others reshared an old political cartoon depicting Trump, with nearly everything in the drawing, including the president's suit and the American flag he's raising, labeled as being 'Made in China' — all except for Trump's own gaseous product, which is labeled as 'Made in USA.' Official Chinese accounts have also gotten in on the fun. Last weekend, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, posted a meme appearing to mock Trump for imposing tariffs on several largely barren Antarctic islands inhabited by penguins rather than people. Some have been subtler with their critiques. On Monday, the Chinese Embassy reposted a clip of a 1987 speech given by President Ronald Reagan, whose economic agenda hugely influenced mainstream Republican economics today. In it, Reagan staunchly defends free trade. 'You see, at first when someone says, 'Let's impose tariffs on foreign imports,' it looks like they're doing a patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes, for a short while, it works. But only for a short time,' Reagan says in the clip, before launching into a list of consequences. Trump's calls to embrace domestic manufacturing come as China has pushed to make its economy look more like that of the U.S. Aiming to reduce its economic reliance on exports, China has been struggling to encourage domestic consumption, expanding subsidies for home appliances such as microwaves and rice cookers, as well as smartphones and other electronic devices. By contrast, Trump's vision for the United States, whose high consumption of Chinese-manufactured goods has helped propel China's economic rise, involves industrial revival for everything from aluminum refining to shipbuilding. At least in the short term, both the U.S. and Chinese goals are 'pipe dreams,' said Ian Johnson, formerly a senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. 'China has been trying for decades to promote consumption or to get people to consume more, but for a variety of reasons Chinese people aren't willing to do that,' Johnson said in a phone interview Tuesday, citing the lack of social safety net that drives high levels of personal savings. 'The government hasn't changed structural issues that hold back consumption,' Johnson said. 'So until they do that, that's not going to work.' On the U.S. side, Johnson said, 'it's difficult because the government is trying to turn back the clock and I don't think that's fully possible, no matter how high the tariffs are.' 'You're never going to bring back, for example, shoe manufacturing, or things like that, or textile manufacturing to the United States, because it's still going to be too expensive, even if you put 100% tariffs," he said. Some American manufacturing jobs, Johnson said, 'are just gone forever and are not going to come back. And in the case of China, their goal is more reasonable, but it would require huge changes in how the economy and society are structured.' Trump has alluded to his vision of American industrial revival in justifying mounting tariffs on Chinese goods, starting with 20% in additional tariffs he imposed in February and March, citing China's role in the international flow of fentanyl precursors. Last week, he announced a baseline 10% tariff on imports from all countries, with higher tariffs for dozens of specific trading partners — particularly China. On Wednesday, he announced that he will pause higher tariffs for 90 days on some trading partners that have not retaliated, although the 10% baseline tariff will remain in place for all countries. On Tuesday, before Trump announced the new 125% tariff, China vowed to 'resolutely take countermeasures to safeguard its own interests.' 'The U.S. threat to escalate tariffs on China is a mistake upon a mistake, further exposing the coercive nature of the U.S.,' the Commerce Ministry said in a statement. 'If the U.S. insists in its own way, China will fight to the end.' In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, Trump said China 'wants to make a deal, badly, but they don't know how to get it started.' 'We are waiting for their call. It will happen!' he wrote. The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not confirm whether any negotiations with the U.S. were underway. 'It seems to me that the actions of the U.S. do not reflect a genuine willingness to engage in serious dialogue,' ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said at a regular briefing in Beijing. 'If the U.S. truly wants to talk, it should demonstrate an attitude of equality, mutual respect and reciprocity.' The Trump administration says that menial jobs would be automated in revived U.S. factories, and that Americans working in them would be doing higher-level tasks. 'Our high-school-educated Americans — the core to our workforce — is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high-tech factories, which are all coming to America,' Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday on CBS News' 'Face the Nation.'
