The second international One Health Day is marked on Friday 3 November – drawing attention to the interconnectedness of human, animal and environmental health.
More than 60 per cent of emerging infectious diseases affecting people have their origin in wildlife or livestock (zoonoses) with factors driving their spread including climate change, land-use change and the massive expansion of towns and cities. As well as presenting a threat of global disease outbreak, as in the cases of, for example, Ebola or avian flu, these zoonoses can devastate the lives and livelihoods of some of the poorest people.
One Health recognises this – and the consequent pressing need for a holistic approach to disease research, policy and control. Only by collaborating across sectors and disciplines, and considering animal and environmental health alongside human health, can zoonotic disease be tackled, and better and more effective poverty and public health interventions emerge.
IDS researchers connected to the ESRC STEPS Centre are currently offering social science insight in One Health research projects in Tanzania, with the Livestock, Livelihoods and Health programme, and in Myanmar, with the Myanmar Pig Partnership.
Further One Health reading:
- One Health for a changing world: zoonoses, ecosystems and human well-being – a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, co-edited by STEPS Centre Director Professor Ian Scoones.
- One Health: Science, politics and zoonotic disease in Africa – with chapters from researchers who worked with the IDS-led One Health project Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium. Edited by Kevin Bardosh.
- One Health stories – a multimedia album of case studies from the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium.
Image credit: Bernard Bett/ILRI
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