Committing oneself to saving vultures may not be everyone's idea of a life vocation. But for 33-year-old Arnab Basu, based India's state of Assam, it is a serious mission with global health ramifications. Over the last 10 years, the population of vultures in India and Pakistan has reduced by 95 per cent - they are now at risk of extinction. Vultures have an important ecological role in the Asian environment, where they have been relied upon for millennia to clean up and remove dead livestock and even human corpses. The decline in vultures is creating serious health concerns. The carcasses of dead animals, rather than being