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One Health Approach
One Health is an approach to designing and implementing programs, policies, legislation, and research in which multiple sectors communicate and work together to achieve better public health outcomes. The areas of work in which a One Health approach is particularly relevant to include food safety, the control of zoonoses (diseases that can spread between animals and humans, such as flu, rabies, and Rift Valley Fever), and combatting antibiotic resistance (when bacteria change after being exposed to antibiotics and become more difficult to treat).
Why do we need a One Health approach?
- Many of the same microbes infect animals and humans, as they share the eco-systems they live in.
- Efforts by just one sector cannot prevent or eliminate the problem. For instance, rabies in humans is effectively prevented only by targeting the animal source of the virus (for example, by vaccinating dogs).
- Information on influenza viruses circulating in animals is crucial to the selection of viruses for human vaccines for potential influenza pandemics.
- Drug-resistant microbes can be transmitted between animals and humans through direct contact between animals and humans or through contaminated food, so to effectively contain it, a well-coordinated approach in humans and in animals is required.
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Challenges:
- Planetary Environmental health may affect human and animal health through contamination, pollution and changing climate conditions that may lead to emergence of new infectious agents.
- Worldwide, nearly 75 percent of all emerging human infectious diseases in the past three decades originated in animals.
- The world population is projected to grow from 7 billion in 2011 to 9 billion by 2050.
- To provide adequate healthcare, food, and water for the growing global population, the health professions, and their related disciplines and institutions, must work together.
- Human-animal interactions/bonds can beneficially impact the health of both people and animals.
Potential Outcomes from the One Health Approach
- More interdisciplinary programs in education, training, research, and established policy
- More information sharing related to disease detection, diagnosis, education and research
- More prevention of diseases, both infectious and chronic
- Development of new therapies and approaches to treatments
Today’s health problems are frequently complex, transboundary, multifactorial, and across species, and if approached from a purely medical, veterinary, or ecological standpoint, it is unlikely that sustainable mitigation strategies will be produced. One Health approaches for an innovative and effective control of both infectious and multifactorial non-communicable diseases.
