What is One Health? The simple answer is that it is the space on a Venn diagram where animal, human, and environmental health overlap. It is an interdisciplinary approach that employs the knowledge and perspective from many fields to evaluate a health-related issue, eliminating (to the best of its ability) the silo-effect, often seen in research and science-based projects. A lot of One Health programs and organisations love to use the umbrella analogy. It’s a fairly good representation of One Health; however, I’m not entirely convinced it is exhaustive. Partly because it doesn’t fully address mental health and human behaviours.

Human Health and Health Economics are part of those pieces, but the U.S. is still trailing behind considerably with mental health as part of human health and wellbeing and not all human behaviours are economically driven. Additionally, it fails to account for the crossroads of health and art, health and advocacy, and has only recently been acknowledging the positive contributions of microorganisms (in soil health, the role of the gut microbiome, or even the beneficial ways that pathogens drive certain processes in the environment).

The benefits? I suppose that is the thing I love most about One Health: it can be as diverse as our imaginations will allow, limited only by our own creative prowess. When the bottom line for a health initiative is to maintain a balanced and healthy system, without judgement, for all life on Earth, then I think you are pretty much seeing One Health in action.

Below are links to resources that describe various One Health programs and all of the different initiatives they have implemented. You will see a trend that revolves around antimicrobial resistance, food safety and security, animal welfare in pastural societies, efforts to eliminate rabies, and zoonotic diseases (emerging and neglected). These are all incredibly important efforts, and with a changing climate will become ever more crucial to our survival and health.