“In some regions of India, declines in vulture populations are associated with more than a 4% increase in human mortality”

The Earth is experiencing a massive episode of biodiversity extinction. According to the latest report from the NGO World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the number of wild vertebrates has fallen by 73% since 1973. As the loss of biodiversity is the consequence of very broad systemic phenomena, such as deforestation, it is often difficult to evaluate its direct effects on human health. It is this obstacle that two economists, Eyal Frank and Anant Sudarshan, managed to overcome in a recent study published in the American Economic Review, who thus inform us of the cost – exorbitant – of the collapse of a single species in a particular context: that of the vulture in India. Also read the column | Article reserved for our subscribers Sandra Lavorel, ecologist: “In a world with less biodiversity, it will be more difficult and more expensive to feed ourselves” Read later Vultures, despite their lack of sex appeal (Darwin himself would have them described as “disgusting birds” since the Beagle Bridge in 1835), constitute what ecologists call a “key species”, whose disappearance would compromise the structure and functioning of an entire ecosystem. The vulture is a particularly efficient predator, capable of removing the carcass of a cow in forty minutes! This is a particularly useful service in a country with 500 million head of livestock and a rudimentary rendering infrastructure. The vulture’s predatory competitors are rats and wild dogs. However, these pose two significant public health problems. First, they are much less effective, leaving remains of carcasses that disintegrate and contaminate waterways, spreading diseases such as cholera, dysentery or typhoid fever. Second, they carry rabies. Of the approximately 59,000 annual deaths worldwide from the disease, more than a third occur in India, a large proportion of them among children under 15 years of age. For the benefit of private interests The wild vulture population in India experienced a 95% decline in the second half of the 1990s. The cause of this decline remained a mystery for a long time, until scientists were able to show, in 2004, that it was attributable to poisoning by a particular molecule: diclofenac. It is an anti-inflammatory widely used since the 1970s but whose veterinary use only developed in India from 1994, thanks to the expiration of the pharmaceutical patent which allowed the marketing of cheap generics. In its veterinary applications, diclofenac is used to treat infections, fever, and inflammation. You have 34.16% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.



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