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

Cassidy, Angela

While OH encompasses research, policy and clinical practice, the preceding stories show that scientists and their research lie at its core. Consequently, scientific citation databases can reveal its entry into, and expression in, research agendas, as shown in the earlier analysis of Schwabe's VMHH. The development of the OH bandwagon can be traced in the same way: usage of the term in journal articles spiked after the WHO-FAO-OIE joint statement, and increased sharply between 2012 and 2016 ( Fig. 6.3) . 82 Analysis of these references by subject area throws further doubt on the ambitions of OH advocates to work across and/or beyond the boundaries of human, animal and environmental health. More than 60% of publications discussing OH are published in veterinary science journals, with a limited reach into fields of human medicine, such as infectious diseases and public health, and very few citations in other biomedical or environmental science journals. 83 This is supported by a recent analysis of the literature on dynamic disease modelling (a technique used in veterinary, medical and ecological sciences), which found three distinct publication 'silos': one in ecology, one in veterinary medicine and a third multidisciplinary group dominated by epidemiology, statistics and public health. Between 1990 and 2015, the three groups remained distinct, maintaining different methodological practices, and while ecologists and veterinarians increasingly cited authors from the third group, they did not cite each other. 84 The capacity to search by keyword also provides a direct technique for 'following the animals' in OH research, telling us which animals actually feature in journal publications and offering some insight into what roles they are awarded by researchers. The Web of Science database was therefore searched for 'one health', alongside a series of animal names and roles. The relative frequency of these terms and the scientific content of the articles in which they feature were recorded. The results of this process are shown in Tables 6.1 and 6.2. Perhaps the most striking finding is that the most frequently mentioned animal in the scientific literature on 83 Galaz et al. (2015) , Cassidy (2016) . See also Friese and Nuyts (2017) . 84 Manlove et al. (2016) . OH is actually the human animal, while non-human animals are referred to mostly in generic terms. The roles that animals were awarded in scientific research are indicated via the use of categories such as 'models' (model organisms employed as experimental material in human biomedical research), 'food' (as a source of human infection, rather than nutrition, as discussed in Chapter 4), 'wildlife' (hosts and transmitters of zoonotic infections), 'livestock' (intermediate hosts and transmitters of parasites, as described in Chapter 5, and as zoonotic disease transmitters), and 'pets/ companion animals' (again as zoonotic disease transmitters). Many of the journal articles using these terms demonstrate a lack of specificity about what aspects of health or disease are actually of concern. Far fewer OH articles mention specific types of animal, and when they do, a few species dominate (Table 6 .2). This makes it possible to examine the articles more closely and analyse the specific animal contributions to human health that researchers are interested in. Dogs feature most commonly, primarily as vectors of zoonotic disease, particularly rabies, and as direct threats to human health via bites (whi