Systems One Health: Equitable engagement
Systems One Health: Equitable engagement
‘One Health’ describes issues and activities at the interface between humans, animals and the
environment. Effective One Health practices create greater benefits for stakeholders in these
sectors, more efficiently and cost-effectively than can be achieved by working alone. One Health
approaches often still put human health outcomes first, without considering additional benefits that
could be achieved at the same time, such as food security, conservation and economic
development.
When these additional outcomes are ignored, critical participants such as farmers, traders or
marginalised or vulnerable communities, may not engage with One Health initiatives or may have
their livelihood activities curtailed or even eroded by more powerful stakeholders.
Taking a ‘systems view’ of One Health will help to make One Health more equitable and
sustainable. While progress is being made and expertise developed, One Health often just
involves tackling a short list of diseases transmissible between humans and animals. Focusing on
this list only, runs the risk of failing to detect currently unknown disease threats. A narrow focus
also fails to identify and address allied issues such as improved agricultural sustainability,
preservation of biodiversity or ‘green’ development. There is a need to widen One Health to
achieve risk reduction, instead of just detection, of both targeted diseases and allied risks.
Systems One Health shows us the way to equitably engage multiple stakeholders and target
critical control points in the human-animal-environment web to simultaneously reduce disease risk
and sustain livelihoods. We are working with Asian Development Bank and the Australian Centre
for International Agricultural Research, to promote and implement these big-picture One Health
approaches to Cross-sectional collaborations.
Read more about our One Health Work
(https://mspgh.unimelb.edu.au/research-groups/nossal-institute-for-global-health/one-health)
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More Information
Angus Campbell
a.campbell@unimelb.edu.au
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