Vultures

Human health and environmental health are intricately linked. For example, when the veterinary drug Diclofenac unintentionally caused mass vulture mortality in India, free-ranging dog populations increased with readily available carrion, and thus human rabies cases from rabid dog bites skyrocketed. The solution to this problem was to ban the use of Diclofenac, with the hopes that alternative veterinary drugs would allow vulture populations to rebound and human rabies risks to decrease--an “ecological lever” for improving environmental and human health. Solutions like this are in high demand by sustainability researchers and practitioners, but there is no central data repository for all such solutions.