Malcolm X once said, “Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless.” Cowardly or not, that is how the vulture survives. Not many animals can survive like it either. They always seem to make work with what they’ve got. Vultures can feast an animal covered in deadly microbes, and still be immune to them. Vultures typically eat rotting flesh, sometimes even through body cavities often consuming fecal matter. Helpless, dead, or dismantled carcass- whatever you’d like to call it, is consumed by the vulture in a way that have scientists baffled.
Vultures have immunity toward these microbes. Microorganisms like this that cause disease or fermentation would make a quick kill of any other animal. Researchers have looked into the intestines of vultures to see why these animals stand out against the microbes. DNA located in the intestines includes 76 types of different microorganisms. Lars Hestbjerg Hansen is a microbiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is also the author on a new study on these birds. He admits that although it would feel as though the microbiome inside vultures is complex to make it better, it is actually quite simple.
Hansen thinks that over some period of time, vultures have made an adaptation. They have made it possible to surpass the disease and eat past the toxic bacteria in carcasses. He also suggests that the digestive system may destroy the bacteria, since it does not show up in the stool of vultures. With all of the horrific diseases going into vultures and nothing going out, my first thought was to question if vultures are spreading diseases. However, Dr. Hansen says that there are no signs indicating this. 
It is amazing to me that we have no real idea where or why this happens. The human body seems so complex and varied, yet we have professionals and medical practitioners. This is a bird that eats DEADLY things and we can’t figure out what is going on in that little body. I would be interested to see how further testing on this would go. How would you try to find something like this out?
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/science/a-vultures-gut-is-simple-but-seems-effective.html?ref=science