How 'One Health' seeks to disrupt the 'cycle of panic and neglect'

At a Devex event held on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly, public health experts advocated a “One Health” approach — integrating the health of humans with that of the environment, plants, and animals — to better understand future health threats. While such an approach could prevent pandemics and save governments trillions, One Health currently lacks consistent implementation and requires closer collaboration across disciplines, panelists said. That could involve surveillance of animals — with partnerships among experts in the environment, wildlife, water, and agriculture sectors — to predict and ameliorate disease outbreaks that may spread to humans. “We need to develop and strengthen a more coordinated surveillance system,” said Dr. Yewande Alimi, a program coordinator at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. “We need to build a national- and district-level workforce of multidisciplinary teams.” “If you look at the monkeypox problem, we’ve seen that coming,” said Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, referring to recent outbreaks of the disease across multiple continents. “Yet it’s very difficult to get attention for these problems unless there are human diseases. Our biggest challenge is to find that attention, to get this awareness about the early stages and what you can do there to prevent the downstream problems from happening. That’s money worth spending,” said Koopmans, who heads the Department of Viroscience at Erasmus University Medical Center. What happens next? Developing messaging and acquiring funds for a preventive approach can be difficult, as it may be seen as less important among populations dealing with problems that already exist. According to Koopmans, taking this kind of approach would require transferring resources from the health sector to other areas, filling funding gaps between sectors, and building relationships that could be crucial when the next health crisis hits. Work had to be done to convince policymakers and finance ministers that funding early interventions would be a sound investment, said Eloise Todd, a co-founder of the Pandemic Action Network, which aims to learn lessons from COVID-19 and prevent future pandemics. “We have to make the case and puncture the … cycle of panic and neglect, to make the case for the investments in a One Health approach, in prevention, in preparedness,” she said. “It’s much more economically viable than waiting for the bad thing to happen.”