Wildlife veterinarians guiding India’s cheetah introduction project have proposed medical evaluation of all the cheetahs at the Kuno National Park amid concerns that neck collars, wet weather and flies have formed a deadly triad that has killed two cheetahs.

The evaluation will help the project authorities determine the extent of the problem, believed to have been triggered by skin inflammation under the neck collars, and choose possible options to address the issue, experts associated with the project said.

A post-mortem study and images of the carcasses of two South African male cheetahs that died on Friday and Tuesday have led veterinarians to suggest that they were victims of myiasis — an infestation by fly larvae feeding on living or dead tissues and creating wounds.

The veterinarians suspect that humid or wet weather caused water to accumulate under the neck collars, causing skin inflammation and drawing flies. When the flies laid eggs, the larvae, or maggots, fed on tissues, creating open wounds that were infected by bacteria, leading to septicaemia (blood poisoning).

“The initial step now is to evaluate as many of the cats as possible to try and understand the extent of the problem,” said Adrian Tordiffe, a cheetah specialist and associate professor at the University of Pretoria in South Africa who is guiding the project.

Mike Toft, a wildlife veterinarian who has extensive experience with cheetahs in South Africa, is expected to arrive at the Kuno National Park on Tuesday.

Toft’s visit was requested by the National Tiger Conservation Authority, the Union environment ministry agency implementing the project.

Veterinarians began discussing options on Saturday.

“We have an insecticidal drug that we can use and that will be very effective in inhibiting the maggot growth, but we also have long-acting antibiotics that we can use to prevent bacterial infections and septicaemia,” Tordiffe said.

“But those drugs will last for a maximum of two weeks each time they dart an animal. It would not be ideal to keep treating them that way,” he added.

“If any of the cheetahs have serious skin irritation, the collars would then have to be removed. In that case some of the cheetahs in the wild would need to be temporarily brought back into the fenced enclosures until the end of the monsoon, then re-collared.”

Weather data shows that both Sheopur and Morena — the two districts in Madhya Pradesh that Kuno straddles — have received excess rainfall since the monsoon began this year. Sheopur has received double its normal rainfall, while Morena has received 56 per cent excess rainfall.

A decision on what option to choose would be possible only after the evaluation reveals the extent of the problem. A quick examination of a single cheetah on Saturday indicated that it had signs of skin inflammation under the collar.

The project has lost five of the 20 cheetahs it had received from Africa and three of the four cubs born in Kuno. India had flown in eight cheetahs from Namibia last September and 12 more from South Africa in February this year to serve as founders of wild cheetah populations in India.

Many wildlife biologists have for months decried the efforts to introduce cheetahs into India as a “vanity project”, pursued without adequate preparation and without assessment of whether Kuno has sufficient space to accommodate the free-ranging animals.

Project scientists have asserted that the cheetah deaths, while unfortunate, should not be viewed as a setback to the project. The criterion for the project’s success in the short-term, they say, was only 50 per cent survival among the introduced cheetahs in the first year.