Vultures are considered a “keystone species” critical to their surrounding habitat because, as highly-efficient scavengers, they play an important sanitation role. Farmers have long relied on them to remove the rotting bodies of dead livestock. But vultures in India came close to extinction in the mid-1990s after an anti-inflammatory drug (diclofenac) used to treat cattle poisoned and killed the birds. Harris Public Policy’s Eyal Frank and EPIC Non-Resident Scholar Anant Sudarshan studied whether the decline in vultures had an impact on human health.
Frank and Sudarshan compared human death rates in Indian districts that once thrived with vultures to areas with historically low vulture populations both before and after the vulture collapse. They found that just after the anti-inflammatory drug sales rose and the vulture population collapsed, the human death rate increased by more than 4 percent in the districts where the birds once prospered. This meant that between 2000 and 2005 the loss of vultures caused about 100,000 additional human deaths each year, resulting in damages valued at $69.4 billion. The deaths stemmed from the proliferation of disease and bacteria that the vultures would have ordinarily removed from the environment—namely rabies from the increase in feral dogs and drinking water contamination from runoff and poor disposal methods.