Asian vultures will be extinct in the wild within a decade without urgent action to eliminate the livestock drug that has caused their catastrophic decline, a newly published paper warns.

A new generation of antibiotics, new treatments for thinning bone disease and kidney failure, and new cancer treatments may all be lost unless the world acts to reverse the present alarming rate of biodiversity loss.

May 19 will see the release of the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species for birds. Occurring every four years, this full update is a global assessment of every bird species on earth.