Toxicity of diclofenac to Gyps vultures - PubMed (original) (raw)

. 2006 Jun 22;2(2):279-82.

doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2005.0425.

Richard Cuthbert, Miguel Quevedo, Rhys E Green, Deborah J Pain, Paul Bartels, Andrew A Cunningham, Neil Duncan, Andrew A Meharg, J Lindsay Oaks, Jemima Parry-Jones, Susanne Shultz, Mark A Taggart, Gerhard Verdoorn, Kerri Wolter

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Toxicity of diclofenac to Gyps vultures

Gerry E Swan et al. Biol Lett. 2006.

Abstract

Three endemic vulture species Gyps bengalensis, Gyps indicus and Gyps tenuirostris are critically endangered following dramatic declines in South Asia resulting from exposure to diclofenac, a veterinary drug present in the livestock carcasses that they scavenge. Diclofenac is widely used globally and could present a risk to Gyps species from other regions. In this study, we test the toxicity of diclofenac to a Eurasian (Gyps fulvus) and an African (Gyps africanus) species, neither of which is threatened. A dose of 0.8 mg kg(-1) of diclofenac was highly toxic to both species, indicating that they are at least as sensitive to diclofenac as G. bengalensis, for which we estimate an LD50 of 0.1-0.2 mg kg(-1). We suggest that diclofenac is likely to be toxic to all eight Gyps species, and that G. africanus, which is phylogenetically close to G. bengalensis, would be a suitable surrogate for the safety testing of alternative drugs to diclofenac.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

(a) Uric acid and (b) alanine transferase (ALT) concentrations in plasma measured before and after oral treatment of vultures with 0.8 mg kg−1 of diclofenac. Lines connect data for the same bird. Results are shown for two diclofenac-dosed (filled squares) and two sham-treated (open squares) Gyps africanus, and for three diclofenac-dosed G. fulvus (filled diamonds).

Figure 2

Figure 2

Uric acid concentration in the plasma of Gyps vultures at 24 h after treatment with diclofenac in relation to dose. Open symbols represent Gyps bengalensis from the experiments of Oaks et al. (2004), black symbols represent G. africanus and grey symbols represent G. fulvus. Results for zero dose are for two untreated captive G. fulvus, three treated G. fulvus sampled before treatment, two untreated control G. africanus, two treated G. africanus sampled before treatment and the geometric mean for 14 wild G. africanus (filled square with vertical line showing the range from the 2.5th to 97.5th percentiles of a lognormal distribution from Gatome 2002; table 5). Diamonds are data for birds that died with gout after treatment. Squares represent untreated birds (zero dose) and survivors of treatment. The outlying G. bengalensis that died with gout after receiving a very low dose of diclofenac (see text) is labelled Gb11.

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