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

Cassidy, Angela

Working in this tradition, Jakob Zinsstag joined the STPH during the 1990s to perform postdoctoral research on trypanosomiasis in the Gambia. After spending four years directing the CSRS in Cote D'Ivoire, he then returned to Switzerland to head up the STPH's animal health research group. For many years this group has worked on topics in and around global livestock health and international development, including the epidemiology of zoonotic and parasitic diseases, and also public health interventions such as vaccination, as described above. As 56 Zinsstag et al. (2005) . 57 Rudolf was a member of the Geigy family, of the pharmaceutical and chemical company J.R. Geigy, inventors of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), and now part of the contemporary Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis AG (Meier 2017) . 58 See Chapter 5, also Worboys (1996) . 59 Meier (2014 Meier ( , 2015 . 60 The CSRS was administered by the Swiss Academy of Sciences until 2001, after which it was gradually handed over to Ivoirian scientists and national government. suggested by the STPH's institutional orientation towards tropical medicine, the group's work is mostly conducted in the global South, with a particular focus on working with pastoralist communities. It is clear from the STPH group's publications that-like the WCS veterinarians-they were working across human and animal health long before it started using the term OH in the mid-2000s. 61 Alongside their emphasis on health systems, the STPH group also advocate a 'transdisciplinary' approach to OH research and practice, which involves working in participatory partnerships with local communities. 62 In contrast to the WCS group, who work across science and policy from within a non-governmental organization, the engagement of Zinsstag and his colleagues with OH has involved primarily academic activities, such as organizing professional societies, attending conferences, and writing and editing research articles. When they write about OH, the STPH group move rapidly beyond generic discussions of humans and animals towards the specific: it works with particular kinds of people and animals (e.g. mothers, herders, cattle, dogs) on particular diseases (e.g. rabies, brucellosis, Q fever) and in specific places (e.g. Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, Morocco). Highlighting how animals and humans live together in communities or as part of ecosystems, they consider it essential to care for the health of all. While the WCS group sometimes refer to wild animals, usually as disease vectors, the core of their work is with domestic animals, which are awarded roles as food sources, working animals, companions and community members. 63 As STPH's overall focus on human public health implies, this group's version of human-animal health is, like Schwabe's, anthropocentric, albeit with an intense interest in the shared lives and wellbeing of humans and animals, the transmission of infections between the two and the ambition to protect both.