Vultures & The Economics Of Disease

Humans, livestock and wildlife have co-existed for thousands of years, but exponential human population growth, a surge in international travel, increased human encroachment into wildlife habitat and an escalation of organic waste provide the ideal circumstances for the emergence and adaptations of a variety of infectious diseases.

This raises important concerns not only for human health, but also for the economic welfare of nations – as we are learning to our cost.

Increasingly, conservationists are calling for the restoration of ecosystem services, or the contributions that ecosystems make, free of charge, to the well-being of humans. Vultures may not win beauty prizes, but they perform some of the most important ecosystem services in the world. By removing rotting carcasses and other organic waste from the environment, they ensure that these items do not stay around long enough to provide a breeding ground for pathogenic bacteria. As scavengers they are highly efficient, considerably more so than their mammalian counterparts. And as well as directly preventing the development and spread of pathogenic microbes by removing carcasses, they regulate the numbers of mammalian scavengers such as feral dogs, thus preventing the proliferation of diseases such as rabies and canine distemper.

Unfortunately, the future of vultures is becoming less and less certain with every passing decade. Facing catastrophic declines in Asia and Africa, Old World vultures are now regarded as one of the most threatened avian guilds on the planet.