Indian Vultures - the Future looks bright - but not for Zidane ?

The Royal Society for Protection of birds has issued a press release about the banning of diclofenac (Voltaren is the commercial name) in India which was identified as having almost destroyed the Indian subcontinents vulture population ingesting the drug from dead cows. This cheap (off patent) Non Steroidal Anti-inflammatory Drug, (NSAID) livestock drug has now been banned and is ideally replaced by the use of meloxicam, said to be equally effective and not harmful to the (now ) tiny vulture population.

They say,

Vultures have for centuries played an irreplaceable role in cleaning the millions of carcasses of domestic animals left at special carcass dumps throughout south Asia but particularly in India, Pakistan and Nepal.

..but omit to mention they also clean the corpses of dead humans, left by different religious sects( e.g The Parsees of Bombay (Mumbai) of the Stones of Silence Temple,) for cleansing by vultures. This cleansing is recognised as preventing the spread from animals to humans of TB, Brucellosis and Anthrax, and also preventing the spread of animal diseases such as Foot and Mouth, rinderpest and pleuro-pneumonia.

They also point out the severe economic impact the loss of vultures has had.

The collapse in vulture populations has affected thousands of leather tanners, bone collectors, craftsmen and glue makers who rely on cleaned carcasses for their livelihoods.

Banning diclofenac and an intensive breeding program will they hope soon result in an increased vulture population.

DID INDIAN BONES CAUSE BSE / CJD ???

Almost 1 year ago on Sept 5th Lord Patel brouGth the attention of readers to an alarming article in the Lancet 2/9/06 in which Professor Alan Colchester of the University of Kent in England and his daughter Nancy, of the University of Edinburgh that BSE in the UK may have been caused by the tonnes of animal bones and other tissue imported from India for animal feed which also may have contained the remains of humans infected with CJD.

Lord Patel remarked..."India, a desperately poor country has been exporting animal feed to the UK ? We should remember what The Rt. Hon. Stephen Dorrell, Minister of State for Health Her Majesty's Government said on 3rd December 1995 "There is no conceivable risk of BSE being transmitted from cows to people."

Indian neurologists Susarla Shanka and P. Satishchandra of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, rebut the idea in another article in the same issue of the Lancet which appeared to be motivated more by national pride than clear scientific reasoning.

Since then there has been utter and total silence on the topic in the UK and the suggestions of Alan Colchester and his daughter. Bones are still being imported from India and can be used in fertiliser products.. garden bonemeal ... is it impossible that they end up in animal feed ? Again ?

Lord Patel has earlier written about the death of the Indian vultures , 18/02/04 Vultures, Dying faster than the Dodo: Asian vulture populations collapse due to unregulated use of Veterinary medicine and as a result approached the UK Venture Capitalists to see if these modestly filthy rich might see their way to chipping in a few sovs for the vultures and a breeding program. Eventually the Vulture Capitalists came back with a very firm no - they had no desire to be identified with Vultures. Evidently better returns bunging the Labour Party.

FOOTBALLING FOOTNOTE

In a report in the Financial Times (London) of January 27th 2004, Ralph Rogers reports that FIFA’s Player of the Year, the French footballer Zinedine Zidane, who plays for the Italian club Juventus, is being investigated for the long term use of 4 different drugs, which although not proscribed are considered to have performance enhancing effects. One of them is diflocane taken as Voltaren tablets, which Rogers states are widely abused by footballers.

The Juventus doping trial heard evidence of widespread use of Neoton, among other substances, in Italian football. Zinedine Zidane, admitted in court to taking it and a list of other “products” to cope with his heavy playing schedule at Juve (“They told me they were vitamins”).

During the trial, prosecutors probed the unusually high incidence extremely rare terminal disease of the nervous system known as ALS, aka ‘Lou Gehrig’s disease’ named after a famous NY Yankees baseball player who suffered from it.

Parallels were found between the diseases afflicting Italian players and those suffered by athletes in East Germany, who were subjected to a State-sponsored drug programme by the communist authorities throughout the 1970s and ’80s

One case highlighted was that of Gianluca Signorini, a defender with Roma, Genoa and Parma during the nineties, who was totally paralysed by ALS and eventually died aged 42 in November 2002. “They injected me with a lot of Voltaren for the ongoing pains in the shin and Neoton and Esafosfina directly into the veins before the matches,” he told Italy’s Panorama magazine (Zidane was given all three). See 2001 Channel 4 report Pic of Gianlucca in a wheelchair with his wife and family just before his death

Maybe that contibuted to Zidane's World Cup madness ?