Recognizing that the human and animal health are interconnected brings along the challenge of integrating their respective health systems, including routine disease surveillance activities, outbreak management, and emergency preparedness. However, approaches in these different sectors are still unaligned in many ways, including their respective agendas, both at the country and the supranational levels. Several initiates have been launched to study and tackle this problem. Since the early 2000s, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the World Organization of Animal Health (OIE) paved the road of multi-sectorial One Health approaches and collaborations, leading to the recent publication of the Tripartite Zoonoses Guide. In Europe, the “One Health European Joint Programme” aims at fostering the transdisciplinary cooperation of activities that are relevant to One Health within and across European countries. Furthermore, various scientific networks and consortia have been set up to bring together professionals and experiences from different sectors. Integration is key to the One Health agenda, and to the challenge of future preparedness and response to foodborne pathogens and other emerging threats, both from an epidemiological and microbiological perspective. This Research Topic aims at describing first-hand, successful, inspirational (and possibly visionary), experiences about the integration of approaches, procedures and methodologies for One Health surveillance across the human health, animal health, environmental health, and food safety sectors, at the local, national, or supranational levels.

Globalization of the food supply has created conditions favorable for the emergence, reemergence, and spread of food-borne pathogens-compounding the challenge of anticipating, detecting, and effectively responding to food-borne threats to health. In the United States, food-borne agents affect 1 out of 6 individuals and cause approximately 48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3,000 deaths each year. This figure likely represents just the tip of the iceberg, because it fails to account for the broad array of food-borne illnesses or for their wide-ranging repercussions for consumers, government, and the food industry-both domestically and internationally. A One Health approach to food safety may hold the promise of harnessing and integrating the expertise and resources from across the spectrum of multiple health domains including the human and veterinary medical and plant pathology communities with those of the wildlife and aquatic health and ecology communities. The IOM's Forum on Microbial Threats hosted a public workshop on December 13 and 14, 2011 that examined issues critical to the protection of the nation's food supply. The workshop explored existing knowledge and unanswered questions on the nature and extent of food-borne threats to health. Participants discussed the globalization of the U.S. food supply and the burden of illness associated with foodborne threats to health; considered the spectrum of food-borne threats as well as illustrative case studies; reviewed existing research, policies, and practices to prevent and mitigate foodborne threats; and, identified opportunities to reduce future threats to the nation's food supply through the use of a "One Health" approach to food safety. Improving Food Safety Through a One Health Approach: Workshop Summary covers the events of the workshop and explains the recommendations for future related workshops.

One Health is an emerging concept that aims to bring together human, animal, and environmental health. Achieving harmonized approaches for disease detection and prevention is difficult because traditional boundaries of medical and veterinary practice must be crossed. In the 19th and early 20th centuries this was not the case—then researchers like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch and physicians like William Osler and Rudolph Virchow crossed the boundaries between animal and human health. More recently Calvin Schwabe revised the concept of One Medicine. This was critical for the advancement of the field of epidemiology, especially as applied to zoonotic diseases. The future of One Health is at a crossroads with a need to more clearly define its boundaries and demonstrate its benefits. Interestingly the greatest acceptance of One Health is seen in the developing world where it is having significant impacts on control of infectious diseases.

The Quadripartite Organizations – the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH, founded as OIE), and the World Health Organization (WHO) – collaborate to drive the change and transformation required to mitigate the impact of current and future health challenges at the human–animal– plant–environment interface at global, regional and country level. Responding to international requests to prevent future pandemics and to promote health sustainably through the One Health approach, the Quadripartite has developed the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022–2026) (OH JPA). The OH JPA outlines the commitment of the four organizations to collectively advocate and support the implementation of One Health. It builds on, complements and adds value to existing global and regional One Health and coordination initiatives aimed at strengthening capacity to address complex multidimensional health risks with more resilient health systems at global, regional and national level.

The 2018 FAO-OIE-WHO (Tripartite) zoonoses guide, “Taking A Multisectoral, One Health Approach: A Tripartite Guide to Addressing Zoonotic Diseases in Countries” (2018 TZG) is being jointly developed to provide member countries with practical guidance on OH approaches to build national mechanisms for multisectoral coordination, communication, and collaboration to address zoonotic disease threats at the animal-human-environment interface. The 2018 TZG updates and expands on the guidance in the one previous jointly-developed, zoonoses-specific guidance document: the 2008 Tripartite “Zoonotic Diseases: A Guide to Establishing Collaboration between Animal and Human Health Sectors at the Country Level”, developed in WHO South-East Asia Region and Western Pacific Region. The 2018 TZG supports building by countries of the resilience and capacity to address emerging and endemic zoonotic diseases such as avian influenza, rabies, Ebola, and Rift Valley fever, as well as food-borne diseases and antimicrobial resistance, and to minimize their impacts on health, livelihoods, and economies. It additionally supports country efforts to implement WHO International Health Regulations (2005) and OIE international standards, to address gaps identified through external and internal health system evaluations, and to achieve targets of the Sustainable Development Goals. The 2018 TZG provides relevant country ministries and agencies with lessons learned and good practices identified from country-level experiences in taking OH approaches for preparedness, prevention, detection and response to zoonotic disease threats, and provides guidance on multisectoral communication, coordination, and collaboration. It informs on regional and country-level OH activities and relevant unisectoral and multisectoral tools available for countries to use.

H1N1 ("swine flu"), SARS, mad cow disease, and HIV/AIDS are a few examples of zoonotic diseases-diseases transmitted between humans and animals. Zoonotic diseases are a growing concern given multiple factors: their often novel and unpredictable nature, their ability to emerge anywhere and spread rapidly around the globe, and their major economic toll on several disparate industries. Infectious disease surveillance systems are used to detect this threat to human and animal health. By systematically collecting data on the occurrence of infectious diseases in humans and animals, investigators can track the spread of disease and provide an early warning to human and animal health officials, nationally and internationally, for follow-up and response. Unfortunately, and for many reasons, current disease surveillance has been ineffective or untimely in alerting officials to emerging zoonotic diseases. Sustaining Global Surveillance and Response to Emerging Zoonotic Diseases assesses some of the disease surveillance systems around the world, and recommends ways to improve early detection and response. The book presents solutions for improved coordination between human and animal health sectors, and among governments and international organizations. Parties seeking to improve the detection and response to zoonotic diseases-including U.S. government and international health policy makers, researchers, epidemiologists, human health clinicians, and veterinarians-can use this book to help curtail the threat zoonotic diseases pose to economies, societies, and health.

One Health refers to an interdisciplinary approach to solving complex problems at the interface of human and animal health and the wider ecosystem. It represents an integrated and collaborative approach and addresses diverse issues such as the detection and management of emerging and re-emerging infectious and non-infectious diseases, food and water security, food hygiene and global trade. Many complex problems that we currently face must consider anthropogenic factors as well as climate change, environmental impact, international collaboration, tourism, the human-animal bond, economics, plant health and myriad other factors. This book discusses complex concepts in One Health such as preparedness planning, national level governance, inter-agency co-operation, climate change, human activity in sensitive ecosystems, the global food trade and food safety, antimicrobial resistance, surveillance, and communication from policy level to practical application. The book uses real-world case studies from different geographical regions ranging from Asia to the Arctic, different environments from the jungle to the oceans, and different species including bees, fish, domestic and wild animals and humans. The cases are prepared by experts with a diverse range of experience and provide a unique and fascinating on-the-ground approach to One Health topics in practice. One Health Case Studies is an ideal resource for students and practitioners in veterinary medicine, human medicine, public health, agriculture, wildlife management, ecosystem health and environmental management. 5m Books