[quote=@POOHEAD189]
<Snipped quote by mdk>

That is literally not what the article says, and the article does not have a political agenda I do not believe. It was a harmless bacteria that is common to the animal, and the humidity caused the bacteria that is usually in their respiratory tract to get into their bloodstream where it did not belong. 

And while I did not get a degree in zoology, I wanted to and was going to if my university had such a degree, but it's been a fancy of mine since I was a wee lad and I can safely say that plenty of species have come back from the brink of a thousand animals and did not have any debilitating inbreeding, such as the American Bison. It only caused some small problems and was mostly a worry. But there are many well known animals on earth that have a population of 10-20,000 and inbreeding is not an immediate threat. 600,000 is quite a large number for a megafauna.  

Edit: Though a quick search does show me that the Saiga are noted to not have a lot of genetic diversity due to a population bottleneck in the Pliestocene, which kinda leads me to believe that maybe it is a factor of both. 
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This is probably a good time to admit that I didn't click your link -- figured it was a safe skip, because I remember that whole Saiga incident vividly. I'm speaking more generally about alarmism from the papers -- that's one of my "triggers" if you will. "Bad thing happened -- LET'S POSTULATE HOW CLIMATE CHANGE IS RESPONSIBLE AND THEN PUBLISH AN ARTICLE ABOUT IT! Damn the scientists, we have readers to think about!" 

It happens, and I blame the publicists for making me mistrust what could be real important info. More recent example would be the latest hurricane season -- climate science came right out and said "WE NEED MORE DATA, this probably has nothing to do with climate change." Less than 24 hours later, everyone wrote their articles anyway, and there "wasn't a political agenda" it was "science."