This project aims to assess the potential benefits – across a range of public health disciplines – of establishing One Health platforms and centres of excellence in both high-income and low- and middle-income settings. These platforms would act as strategic forums that guide local priorities, activities and other ventures that operate under One Health principles.
In recent decades, there has been much greater recognition of how human health is fundamentally linked to animal health and environmental wellbeing. This understanding has grown in part due to the increasing frequency of outbreaks and the emergence, of infectious diseases arising from animal reservoirs such as West Nile virus, Rift Valley fever virus and the Ebola virus. In light of this, many countries have established public health initiatives that engage all three disciplines: human, animal and environmental health and there are many examples of recent successes across the One Health spectrum.
The Centre on Global Health Security is organizing a series of roundtables and leading a research project to analyse the scope of current One Health activities in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, and to evaluate the conditions required for governments, public health stakeholders and the private sector to better support the implementation of One Health principles.