One health for people, animals and environment

When the topic of this report was chosen, the COVID-19 pandemic was in its initiation stage. China was the only country to be affected, and the rest of the world was watching with a mixture of curiosity and compassion. Three years later, the pandemic has humbled the entire globe, including the highest-income countries. This experience has emphasised that we must embrace the One Health approach as we face, or prevent, current and future epidemics.

Developed in the early 2000s, this framework arose as we were witnessing the emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases, a phenomena exacerbated by globalisation. One Health has a simple guiding principle: to protect the health of human populations, it is essential to preserve the health of
animal populations and ecosystems. This idea seemed obvious to Louis Pasteur and other 19th century scholars. However, their enlightened understanding of life’s interconnectedness was somehow lost in the 20th century, as science became ever more compartmentalised. Such division is tragic: each field of study has amassed a wealth of knowledge that should be combined to serve the greater good of mankind.

Current events have underscored that public health challenges must be tackled by deploying and combining discoveries in numerous disciplines. While human and veterinary medicine are essential, so are biology, ecology, mathematics, economics, and the social sciences. Indeed, 60% of human infectious diseases originate in animals, and 70% are transmitted by wildlife. Only an interdisciplinary approach can provide the toolkit we need to grapple with the increasingly intense health challenges that are sure to arise in the years ahead due to globalisation and global changes (e.g., land use shifts, climate change, biodiversity losses).