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IANS
New Delhi
In a most unusual wildlife health study, ornithologists trace the phenomenon of bacteria in a migratory vulture species that is gaining antibiotic resistance during its sojourn in India -- and this is quite widespread and can be epidemic too.
But the drug-resistance bacteria are not necessarily harmful to the birds that have them, say the ecologists. The first-of-its-kind study on a wild migratory species in this part of the world has thrown up results that are both interesting and surprising.
E coli or Escherichia coli, a pathogen seen in over 90 percent of Egyptian vultures that migrate during winter in northwest India, changed during their migration, which means the local environment is a key component of E coli strains, microbiologist Pradeep Sharma told IANS.
In an interview, he said the level of antibiotic resistance in the vultures was very high and the E coli showed resistance to a wide range of antibiotics throughout their stay in India.
The resistance varied to different drugs over the winter. This sort of study, published last month in the journal Infection Ecology and Epidemiology, to locate patterns of antibiotic resistance is novel to the microbial and wildlife world, said Sharma.
He's working with the College of Veterinary and Animal Science of the Rajasthan University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences in Bikaner in Rajasthan. A team led by Sharma studied vultures that arrived in Bikaner in October 2011 and departed in March 2012.
They fed on cattle carcasses dumped in Jorbeer in Bikaner. The study shows that in countries like India, where wildlife is frequently in contact with people and domestic animals, the government ought to be monitoring the health of wild animals much more to check any epidemic.
