What if we’ve got it wrong? Since WVI was founded over twenty years ago, we have talked about veterinary expertise as the missing piece of the puzzle, of wildlife health as the too- often-forgotten aspect of conservation, of conservation medicine as the add-on that can make the difference between life and death of an individual animal, between saving and losing a population of a threatened species, between global survival and extinction.

The evidence today is compelling. Wildlife health is not a simple puzzle piece with clearly defined edges that can be slotted into a small hole to magically complete the whole picture and cure disease and heal injury. It is layered into every piece of the puzzle that makes up the bigger conservation picture, and is key to making the concept of One Health a meaningful reality – optimising the health of people, animals and ecosystems to the mutual benefit of all.

With a growing recognition of what the practice of a holistic and crosscutting One Health approach should mean, comes a growing understanding of the profound extent to which, “conservation actions and health actions are highly intertwined”[1]. As we look at the bigger picture today, it’s increasingly evident that the drivers of biodiversity loss, often characterised as the key targets for conservation action – loss of habitat, climate change, the illegal wildlife trade - are also the drivers of cross-species health problems.

Land use change, deforestation and intensive agriculture bring humans, domestic animals and wildlife into ever closer contact, providing new opportunities for pathogen spillover and human-wildlife conflict. Among the effects of climate change are an increase in parasite resilience and burdens, and extension of the range and season of vector-borne diseases like bluetongue in wild and domestic ruminants, as well as one-off events like the mass die off of saiga antelope when increased temperature and humidity caused normally harmless bacteria to become suddenly and disastrously virulent. Over-exploitation and illegal trade of wildlife can reduce local genetic diversity and increase disease spillover risk, while pollution has a myriad of health-related impacts for humans and other animals, from ocean plastics causing intestinal blockages in sea turtles and catastrophic poisoning of Asian vultures with diclofenac (with a significant knock on effect on human death rates), to the impact of DDT pesticide on bird reproduction, and even light pollution disrupting their migratory pathways, causing collisions and disorientation. Armed conflict is another key area of concern, often responsible for unintended health consequences, like the unprecedented rise of rabies cases in Ukraine in recent years, as the feral dog and cat population grows and the interface with wildlife expands.

What would a holistic One Health approach to policy – all policy, across government ministries and international organisations – really look like? It should mean building a policy-making framework where every decision involves consideration of what would be best for the health of people, animals and the environment, and where wildlife health is a stated conservation priority. There is potential for such an approach to grow out of the new WHO Pandemic Agreement, adopted in May 2025, as it evolves, as long as there is a concerted and fundamental shift to broaden health concerns from an emphasis on human public health to a broader concept of planetary health, focussed on building the resilience of all species. Approaches to new disease threats could then genuinely be transformed from being primarily reactive to being truly preventative.

Urgent action is key. The UK government recently (January 2026) published its ‘National security assessment on global ecosystems’ which states with “high confidence” that “every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse”[2]. The implications are far reaching and do not make comforting reading.

Against the backdrop of this global biodiversity crisis, how do veterinary professionals, and wildlife vets in particular fit into the process and make a difference? Disease surveillance and early detection, prevention and mitigation have to be key; unlike medical intervention options available to humans and domestic animals, by the time wild animals are sick in any significant numbers, possibilities for treatment are usually limited. While there are cases of wild birds suffering from HPAI being successfully cared for and rehabilitated, for example, they are typically resource and time consuming, and often not sustainable or replicable at any significant scale.

What does this mean for wildlife health and the vets responsible for it? There will of course always be a place for rehabilitating sick and injured individual animals, often under challenging clinical conditions, especially where numbers of a local population or of a species globally are critically low. And it is vital that vets working with free-living wildlife are able to safely, humanely and efficiently immobilise and capture animals in the field (think dramatic image of a vet leaning out of a helicopter to dart a moving elephant). But these hands-on activities are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the wider safeguarding of the health of wild animals and being part of turning the tide on biodiversity loss. Vets can, and should, be key members of inter-disciplinary conservation teams, playing an impactful role by bringing understanding, knowledge and skills in dealing with a wide range of inter-related issues, including: human-wildlife conflict; the use of wildlife translocations for effective population management and in particular how to minimise any associated risk of disease; pathology; disease ecology, outbreak investigation and management; sampling techniques for infectious disease investigation; wildlife crime forensics; species biology and behaviour, population monitoring, and, critically, the role of disease in species decline. Very few, if any, of these skills are routinely taught on undergraduate veterinary courses.

When WVI was founded, hardly any organisations beyond zoos employed vets who specialised in wild animals and their health. That has changed over the intervening two decades, not only in terms of large conservation organisations often now having their own wildlife health divisions, but also in terms of government environment or wildlife departments, routinely including vets on their staff, particularly in LMICs where rich biodiversity corresponds with greater opportunities for emerging disease. Often, however, those vets, along with other key frontline conservationists, lack access to wildlife health training. This is where WVI is focussing efforts in terms of providing in person CPD training coupled with long-term mentoring, funding local vets to attend courses and conferences they cannot otherwise get to, and providing a hub for the exchange of information and international networking, to the benefit of both those working to protect the health of wild animals, and the animals themselves.

Building in-country wildlife health capacity of LMICs in biodiverse regions has never been more important. A recent article in the Lancet (December 2025) considered  the World Organisation for Animal Health’s recent inaugural State of the World’s Animal Health report[3], which identifies some of the most pressing animal health challenges, including zoonoses, transboundary animal diseases, food security and biodiversity loss – recognising they are “all intertwined with human wellbeing”[4].

The authors of the Lancet paper are clear that, “the ability to address these hinges on a robust, equitably distributed and adequately resourced veterinary workforce worldwide”[5]. They are equally clear that we are a long way from achieving that goal. Wildlife and environmental health are often neglected in national and global health frameworks.

Globally, spending on animal health equates to just 0.4% of the human health budget[6]. This disparity leads to critical gaps in disease surveillance and investigation, particularly in resource-constrained LMICs where the wildlife-livestock-human interface is often more pronounced, increasing the likelihood of pathogen transfer, both from wildlife to livestock and humans, and vice versa. This imbalance “directly compromises global health security amidst growing connectivity, massive animal trade, and increasing agricultural intensification – all drivers for pathogen spillovers and contributors to broader planetary degradation”[7].  The enactment of genuine, cross-cutting One Health policies is hampered by the fact that “the veterinary sector, crucial for preventing, detecting and responding to health threats at their source, endures chronic underinvestment and is perceived to be of secondary importance”[8].

This is the reality we face, as committed advocates of wildlife health and capacity building in biodiverse regions; it’s essential that we spread the word and educate the public about just how closely human health depends on wildlife health, ecosystem health and the conservation of biodiversity. It’s vital that we help local vets currently working in wildlife health to access the training they need not to just be able to dart and immobilise a rhino from a moving jeep and take the right kind of biomedical samples from the animal, but to understand the much bigger One Health picture – and how they can make a difference by addressing issues at the human-wildlife interface, and contribute to the a range of wider inventions, from wildlife crime and forensics, disease outbreak investigation and effective pathological examination, to ecological and population sampling and mapping, including methods for tracking and estimating distributions.

This is the arena in which WVI operates – helping train vets and conservationists directly where appropriate, with ongoing mentorship until they become self-sufficient (e.g ARCHELON Turtle Rescue Centre, Greece); providing scholarships for others to access well-respected CPD opportunities (e.g. WVI Wildlife Health Bursaries); providing hands-on clinical support in some instances where there is an acute local need (e.g. in the initial years of Operation Avian) and with overlap between all. In addition, we continue to work tirelessly in the Disease Risk Analysis sphere, in supporting research aimed at simplifying diagnostics in the field, and in strengthening the global network of wildlife veterinary professionals to share and disseminate knowledge, and provide a source of emotional support and friendship between colleagues who share many of the same professional passions, frustrations, challenges and triumphs.

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[1] Dr Craig Stephen, Migratory Species & WildlifeHealth: A Pre-COP15 CMS Webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf9A3aT3QBw

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-assessment-on-global-biodiversity-loss-ecosystem-collapse-and-national-security/national-security-assessment-on-global-ecosystems-accessible-version#:~:text=for%20the%20UK.-,(High%20confidence),(Moderate%20confidence)

[3] https://www.woah.org/app/uploads/2025/05/the-state-of-the-worlds-animal-health-2025.pdf

[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(25)00281-5/fulltext

[5] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(25)00281-5/fulltext

[6] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(25)00281-5/fulltext

[7] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(25)00281-5/fulltext

[8] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(25)00281-5/fulltext