21st century vets: professional dynamics in the era of One Health

Bonnaud, Laure; Fortané, Nicolas

2020. An infectious disease caused by a coronavirus (CoV) known as SARS-C0V-2, identified in China at the end of 2019, is affecting the entire world. This type of infection is common in both animals and humans, and coronaviruses are sometimes zoonotic, i.e. transmissible between animals and humans. The OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health) thus reports that MERS-CoV (at the origin of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in 2012) was transmitted from dromedary camels to man, whilst the transmission to man of the SARS-CoV coronavirus (which affected several Asian countries in 2003 and triggered a global alert from the WHO) involved bats and civets. For several years now, we have known that nearly 75% of emerging infectious diseases are of zoonotic origin and several experts now believe that the emergence of new diseases at the human-animal interface will be recurrent in years to come: ecosystems are undergoing profound changes due to global warming, damage to biodiversity· or the development of industrial livestock farming, that favor the emergence and spread of pathogens through the density, confinement or circulation of animals.