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NEWS
Veterinary painkiller is lethal to vultures
Astudy published online last month in the scientific journal Chemosphere has shown the lethal effects to vultures of a popular painkilling drug used in the cattle farming industry . The toxic drug is known as carprofen and is from the same family of drugs as diclofenac . The frequent and widespread use of diclofenac to treat cattle and buffalo in south Asia is what was responsible for the catastrophic population declines in vultures in that region . Birds that consumed the carcasses of livestock treated with diclofenac experienced sever renal failure and death within hours to days . As a result , five species of South Asian vulture are now endangered or critically endangered . Against this background , conservationists in South Africa are concerned about the impact of similar veterinary drugs on the vultures which are indigenous to this region . To better understand the impact of non-steroidal antiinflammatory drugs ( NSAIDs ) on southern African vultures , a team of researchers from the University of Pretoria , the United Kingdom and associated conservation partners have been conducting a range of toxicity trials . So far , only one common drug , meloxicam , has been shown not to kill vultures at the maximum level of exposure in a carcass . Many drugs belong to this family and the toxicity of most remains unknown . Prof Vinny Naidoo , a coauthor of the study and director of the Biomedical Research Centre , University of Pretoria , South Africa , says : “ We wanted to safety test carprofen because we had some evidence that this drug might be non-toxic to vultures . This would provide vets and farmers another vulture-safe alternative to diclofenac .”
When cattle are treated with carprofen , the drug collects in the kidneys and in the tissue around the site of the injection . In a controlled experiment , vultures were given kidney tissue rich in carprofen or pure carprofen at the maximum levels measured in kidney tissue . These vultures showed no
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