The PHurrowed Brow

A valuable drug helps me regain 20-20 vision. A podcast/radio program reveals that this compound has almost extinguished a critical species of birds because of its overuse in large-animal veterinary medicine. Finally, I see that millions of people in the U.S. benefit from that same medicine in an over-the-counter topical gel. The drug is a thread entwined with several others in strands that stretch from Denver virtually to Delhi, then in real life to the Caribbean and back.

This post is one in a series stretching from Dec. 3rd forward to the 24th.
If the post seems to lack context, I’d encourage you for continuity’s
sake to go back and read earlier ones in order of publication.

II. Science Friday

As recounted in my last post, I successfully underwent surgery for a cataract in November of 2022. I was instructed thereafter to apply a medication in drop form to the recovering eye three times per day. The drops, like all else associated with the surgery, worked very well. They are a prescription-only medication in the NSAID (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug) class. As intended, they prevented inflammation and pain as my eye healed around its new artificial porthole. Good stuff, for which I felt and still feel tremendously grateful!

Fast-forward about three months. It’s a Friday in late February, 2023. I’ve been at the gym and am driving home in the good (?) kind of pain that follows a workout. My pick-up’s radio is tuned to one of our NPR affiliates. The Oscars are on the horizon. So many people, including Latin nerds, are learning and/or talking about the nominees, or are simply hyping their favorites. (You may be an old Latin nerd if you watched the broadcast when Gladiator won so many Oscars in 2001. Were you not entertained? On the other hand, you are just plain old if you remember the similar back-to-back triumphs of Ben Hur and Spartacus back in 1960 and 1961.) But I digress from this particular Friday in 2023, and need to mention science nerds. Science nerds also, of course, generate and transmit Oscar buzz. In fact, the fine and nerdy folk at WNYC who produce the weekly podcast/radio program Science Friday regularly analyze the interplay of cinema and science. Sci Fri (that’s what all we hip nerds call it) includes in its episodes frequent Hollywood Science segments with the goal of discussing/debunking the use/misuse of scientific fact and theory in film and TV. And leaving the gym, I started the truck and the radio sparked up about halfway through one of Sci Fri’s special Hollywood Science pre-Oscar segments.

The conversation really caught my ear and my interest. (Later, because I had missed the first third or so of it, though, I needed to relisten to it via my podcast app.) The segment’s host was interviewing Shaunak Sen, the director of a film that had just been nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary category. From their discussion, the film seemed completely fascinating to me:
1) it was filmed in India– it’s a land in which I’ve long wanted to have an adventure;
2) it is, more specifically, set in contemporary Delhi, a city whose air quality is often so dangerous that it is entirely unsafe to go outside, one where air filters are needed to make even indoor air safely breathable– I grew up in smog-bound Southern California and live in the Denver area with its ozone alerts and wildfire smoke in summer and its ‘brown cloud’ in winter;
3) it narrates and explains shockingly massive die-offs of birds– I had lived through such die-offs here in Colorado since the arrival of the West Nile Virus, seen what drought does to wild bird populations in Kansas, and I had already hard the alarm bells rung by the USDA due to the arrival of HPAI (Highly Pathenogenic Avian Influenza), a disease which later devastated egg and poultry production and is likely to do so again this year;
4) it is, above all, an inspiring story of kindness, courage and hope for human-wildlife interactions, motivations which spur countless rehabilitations of raptors and other carnivorous birds by an astoundingly dedicated, compassionate, and smart pair of brothers, aided by their families and associates.

All captivating enough, to be sure. But when Mr. Sen mentioned the drug which had helped rescue my vision, it caught my attention like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. As Mr. Sen describes in the interview, the drug had been used indiscriminately in veterinary applications and had became a major factor in the near extinction of numerous species in the genus Gyps. Clearly the “good stuff” in my eyedrops could do tremendous harm! How was that possible?

What is this “good stuff”? It’s a solution of diclofenac sodium (generic name). You can read more about the ophthalmic use of diclofenac on the Mayo Clinic’s website. In this liquid form, it is currently available only by prescription.

There is clearly much more to come in this narrative. Look at my next post for more about the overuse of diclofenac and the effects of that in India, as well as about attempts to prevent similar ornithological disasters elsewhere in the world. After that, I’ll offer you information about Mr. Sen’s amazing film.
Spoiler Alert! I was rooting for it to win the Oscar, but it did not.

If you really like spoilers, you can listen to the roughly 12-minute segment from the February 24th, 2023 episode of Science Friday. Just activate the audio player below!

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