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

Cassidy, Angela

This definition of OH was developed by the OH Initiative, a US-based advocacy group: an unfunded group of public health physicians and veterinarians in favour of human-animal health collaboration. 21 While useful for advocates, this definition has not gone uncontested, and the broad and flexible nature of the OH concept has been widely debated. While some believe that this breadth risks losing all meaning and has been detrimental to implementing ideas in practice, 22 others have argued that OH acts as a usefully flexible 'boundary object' or 'umbrella' under which a range of topics, disciplines and forms of collaboration can shelter, facilitating interdisciplinary cooperation up to and including the social sciences and humanities. 23 The metaphor of OH as an umbrella (originally formulated by policy analyst Aline Leboeuf) has proved to be popular among OH advocates. Fig. 6 .1 shows a graphic created by One Health Sweden, depicting fields dealing with zoonosis sheltering on one side, and those involved in clinical research and practice on the other. 24 While this metaphor evidently helps OH advocates to articulate both the breadth and the limits of their endeavour, it abstracts the idea away from the personal, practical and institutional contexts where it originated and is now being adopted worldwide. While OH presents itself as bridging human and animal health, the majority of advocates and actors taking on the idea can be located in the veterinary sciences. The veterinary origins of the agenda has provoked criticism from some doctors, who perceive OH to be a threat to their professional boundaries: this may account for the limited uptake of OH in mainstream medicine. At the same time, some veterinarians have expressed concern that OH will lead to a loss of the specific status and interest in animal health for 21 . 22 Lee and Brumme (2012) pp. 1-8. 23 Leboeuf (2011 ), Wood et al. (2012 , Chien (2013) . 24 Gibbs (2014) , One Health Sweden (2014). its own sake. 25 This defensiveness over disciplinary boundaries, alongside competitiveness over professional status between veterinarians and their more dominant, better-resourced neighbours, would have been familiar to Schwabe and has repeatedly surfaced in veterinary-medical interactions since the nineteenth century. 26 To gain a more nuanced understanding of how the ideas associated with OH came about and came together, the specific contexts where the agenda was first developed bear more detailed examination. To this end, I will now explore the longstanding interests and activities of four interlinked advocacy and research networks that were central to the formation of the OH movement: that of Calvin Schwabe, his students and collaborators; the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (STPH); the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS); and the One Health Initiative and Commission. Exploring these networks in detail offers further insights into how ideas about OH have moved around and built momentum. By examining the publications, activities, locations and working practices of these groups, we can also understand better the roles they awarded to animals within OH, and how they understood the health relationships between humans and animals.