White-nose syndrome has killed millions of North American bats since 2006, and conservation medicine interventions are racing to find effective treatments to prevent species extinctions.
White-nose syndrome causes profound welfare harm to affected bats. The fungus disrupts hibernation, causing bats to arouse repeatedly in winter when no food is available. Affected bats die of starvation, dehydration, and physiological exhaustion — a slow, distressing death over weeks. Individual bat suffering is largely invisible given the scale of population collapse, but it is real and significant. Conservation medicine interventions that can reduce disease burden will prevent both population-level extinction risk and the welfare suffering of individual animals.