One Health can provide a safe, 'no judgment zone' for many needed conversations surrounding our most difficult global and environmental health challenges.
This is a webpage where many items can be shared, from peer reviewed scientific case studies to examples of One Health successes (or missed opportunities) to Op Eds and Opinion Pieces.
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily approved by the One Health Commission but are shared ‘because’ this is a safe, no judgement zone and we need to hear from many perspectives on many of today’s challenges. Thoughtful articles written in a professional tone will be considered for posting. Submit suggested items to ohc@onehealthcommission.org.
See digital One Health stories in a Virtual One Health Exhibition shared by researchers from the Center for International Health CIHLMU and the European University Alliance for Global Health.
To see peer reviewed scientific articles visit the Commission's online One Health Library Journal Articles/White Papers Section.
When Mungy arrived, my household felt complete in line with polls which have repeatedly shown that a vast majority of pet owners (85-91%) regard their pets as family members.2,3 Before we had kids, my parents joked that they had “granddogs.” Most of my neighbors don’t know my actual name, but they recognized me as “Mungy’s Mom.” Another term for “pet” is “companion animal” to denote the importance of the mutually-beneficial relationship between people and their non-human buddies highlighting the importance of the human-animal bond.4,5 In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries added the term “fur baby” (a noun) to denote one’s furry pet, an indication of the popularity with which English speakers, at least, articulate the idea that their companion animal is like a child to them and likewise, defines the owners as pet parents.6 To this day, I cannot understand why I wasn’t allowed to claim Mung Mungy as a dependent on my taxes. My accountant just shakes his head…
Starting with two new practices, namely, humanitarian care for nonhumans and One Health collaborations, the author seeks to determine what forms of political care can incorporate the well-being of future generations and future iterations of the earth.
The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB)’s first annual report, titled ‘A World At Risk,’ offers a snapshot of where the world currently stands in regards to our ability to prevent and control disease outbreaks and other health emergencies. This report provides an independent assessment and comprehensive overview of the international state of preparedness for health threats along with 7 high-level recommendations. The GPMB report finds that the world is facing a high risk of regional and global disease outbreaks with the possibility of causing devastating social, political, public health, and economic consequences. A pandemic may originate from a naturally occurring outbreak, an accidentally released pathogen, or a deliberate event. While the likelihood of a global pandemic is increasing, institutional trust, a key necessity for an effective response, is diminishing. In addition, the report remarks that even though many pathogens have pandemic potential, the fast-moving nature of respiratory pathogens presents unique challenges that we are wholly unprepared to face.
.......investing in pandemic preparedness contributes to poverty alleviation, especially because infectious diseases tend to affect poor people disproportionately more than others. To succeed will require a multipronged effort to persuade policy makers and communities to take measures of the political economy, cultural environment, and embrace a “One Health” approach which recognizes human health as connected to that of animal health and the environment requiring multisectoral engagement when mobilizing and allocating resources. It will mean convincing decision-makers that they should not ignore what is important in lieu
of what is urgent and make preparedness a priority, persuade the private sector to invest in it, and do so in a sustainable manner.
Taking sustainability seriously means that we can no longer ignore our planetary boundaries. We need to start designing tools and policies to make all aspects of society more sustainable, before the costs of doing so become so large as to impoverish us. This has increasingly become a task not just for academics who specialize in the field, but for scholars and researchers generally. Sustainability should now be the lens through which we approach all policy-related empirical questions. We need challenge-driven, mission-oriented research, and that calls for a broad multidisciplinary effort.
Planet Earth has been here for over 4.5 billion years but in just two human generations we have managed to place our only ‘home’ at great risk. Complicating things further, the author observes, we may be on a path where information or data is becoming more important than feelings – reality vs science fiction? Many lessons from history have not yet been learned and new lessons may prove equally, if not more, difficult to take on board as we head deeper into the twenty-first century.
The author argues that One Health – recognising the fundamental interconnections between people, animals, plants, the environment – needs to inform the UN-2030 Sustainable Development Goals and that working towards the adoption of a new mindset is essential.
One Health is a global movement that originated as One Medicine, expanded to include prevention and health promotion, and has gained steady momentum since the middle of the 20th century. It is now increasingly being adopted and implemented globally, not only in academia and research, but also, in some countries at the highest levels of government and policy. In this article the authors explain a critical need to push the boundaries of the One Health framework toward ‘One Health and One Welfare for One Planet’.
"……Recent studies have supported the idea that pets are good for our health. Whether it’s their companionship or their insistence that we get off the couch and move (or both), research shows pets can lower blood pressure, improve our mood and even help us live longer. But I was wondering something different: Does a pet’s health reflect its human’s health status?.........Kate Hodgson, a veterinarian at the University of Toronto’s medical school, has written extensively about integrating the One Health approach into a [human] medical visit. She recommends that primary care physicians routinely ask about family pets and consider collaborating with the family veterinarian, as long as patients give their permission."
In early 2010, ducks began to disappear in northern Nigeria. People would later report that they noticed there were fewer ducks in the area, but no one thought it was important at the time.
However, a few months later in May 2010, public health officials learned that hundreds of children had become sick in northern Nigeria. Reports stated that the children suffered from vomiting, abdominal pain, headaches, and seizures. After becoming ill, many of these children had died.
