Drivers for emerging issues in animal and plant health

Richardson, Jane; Lockhart, Caryl; Pongolini, Stefano; Karesh, William B.; Baylis, Matthew; Goldberg, Tony; Slingenbergh, Jan; Gale, Paul; Venturini, Tommaso; Catchpole, Mike; de Balogh, Katinka; Pautasso, Marco; Broglia, Alessandro; Berthe, Franck; Schans, Jan; Poppy, Guy

With globalisation and international travel, disease movement is now rapid and what were once natural barriers to the spread of disease beyond its local point of origin are becoming immaterial (Banks et al., 2015) . Significant proportions of natural or agriculturally based resources harvested or produced in developing countries are further processed or consumed in economically more advanced countries, providing regular routes for hitch-hiking organisms (Eschen et al., 2015) . Similarly, developing countries often are not self-sufficient in various food commodities and need to import them, hence being at risk of importing new pests or pathogens. Nowhere in the world are the health impacts from infectious diseases more important than in developing countries, where daily work and livelihoods are highly dependent on natural resources, plants and animals. Many developing countries have little to no capacity for the diagnosis of endemic diseases, nor for detecting disease emergence prior to their spread to crops, animals or humans. The linkages of human, animal, plant and environmental health are at the heart of the One Health approach, an increasingly important prism through which governments, non-governmental organisations and practitioners view the public good that is health. While the principles underlying the evolution and ecological principles of disease emergence have not changed, changes in human activities have shifted the playing field on which these natural laws act (Karesh et al., 2012) .