5/19/23

"Oh, I know what that is. It's kidney failure."

In the 1990s vultures in Nepal died in massive numbers from feeding on the corpses of cattle that had been treated with the livestock painkiller diclofenac.
It turns out that if you shut down a vulture's kidneys all this stuff backs up, turns into a paste, and gets deposited in all the organs. What that stuff is is uric acid. They go back to Pakistan, and they start going around to different villages, and just knocking on people’s doors being like, "Hi, I have a bunch of questions for you about your cattle," you know? And as they're processing the surveys they're noticing, like, oh, this phrase keeps popping up over and over again. Diclofenac. It's actually a painkiller. It's in this class of drugs called NSAIDs, Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs. That includes, you know, drugs like Advil, Motrin, Aleve, ibuprofen. [Radiolab]
This week the US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service teamed up to test a vaccine for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) on North American vultures to stem an outbreak in California condors.

“We have met the enemy and he is us." 

The Anthropocene is now.
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