Humans, Other Animals and ‘One Health’ in the Early Twenty-First Century

Cassidy, Angela

The WCS is a USA-based non-governmental organization. Today it describes its core vision as 'a world where wildlife thrives in healthy lands and seas, valued by societies that embrace and benefit from the diversity and integrity of life on earth'. 47 It can be regarded as a US equivalent to the Zoological Society of London, and it runs several zoos and wildlife parks in the USA, including the Bronx Zoo. In addition the WCS runs an international programme of field research and conservation projects; fundraising, policy-making and campaigning; and it has pioneered veterinary wildlife research and practice in its zoos and in the field. From the late 1990s, a small group of veterinarians working at the WCS (including William Karesh and Steven Osofsky) started building collaborative links between themselves, scientists studying emerging infectious diseases, and veterinary scientists and clinicians involved with global livestock health. 48 In 2003 they co-organized a workshop in Durban, South Africa, with the Veterinary Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The purpose of the meeting was to further this collaborative agenda, bringing in practitioners working in government, international health and conservation non-governmental organizations to launch a new international network for health, environment and development, entitled AHEAD. In the workshop briefing, the organizers laid out an agenda for developing better collaborative relationships across these fields, which they described as "One Health". 49 The following year the WCS group organized an international conference on the theme of One World, One Health (OWOH), which was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and held at the foundation's university campus in New york. Over the next few years it built links with the international Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), contributed to international responses to HPAI, and continued to publish its ideas about OH in academic and policy journals. 50 The proceedings of the AHEAD workshop outlined the WCS group's ideas about OH in more detail. Starting with the WHO's widely accepted definition of 'health' as a state of positive wellbeing (rather than the absence of disease), advocates of 'ecosystem health' argue by analogy that ecosystems can also be regarded as patients and evaluated as healthy or otherwise. The WCS veterinarians built on this idea, bringing it together with Schwabe's 'visionary attempts … to construct a bridge between medicine and agriculture' to argue for a broader collaborative approach to improving the health of humans, animals and environments, which they described as OH. 51 These wildlife veterinarians developed the idea of OH primarily to advance their conservation agenda, but it was particularly grounded in thinking about problems of infectious disease, especially zoonoses. Their thinking around zoonotic diseases was, and is, unusually broad. While the WHO defines 'zoonosis' as disease transmission between animals and humans, most actors in global public health today use the term to denote the transmission of infections from animals to humans. By contrast the WCS group and their collaborators discuss the movement of infectious diseases between multiple species, back and forth across wildlife and livestock, humans and animals, much as Schwabe did when challenging the human-animal distinction at the core of 'zoonosis'. 52 If