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

Cassidy, Angela

In 2006, the year after the STPH group's Lancet article, the incoming president of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), Dr Roger Mahr, addressed the association's annual conference. He argued that twenty-first-century challenges of global food security and zoonotic diseases meant that 'the continuing convergence of animal health, human health, and ecosystem health is the new reality', which must be responded to with a 'One World, One Health, One Medicine' approach. Mahr argued that veterinarians should adopt OH. Through building partnerships with public and environmental health professionals, they should assume leading roles in meeting these challenges-and growing the profession along the way. 64 Over the following year, he gained the support of his counterpart at the American Medical Association (AMA), public health physician Ronald M. Davis, who had pre-existing concerns about the risks that zoonotic diseases pose to humans. While this alliance resulted in OH being endorsed by the AMA in 2007, Davis died of cancer the following year and the resolution was subsequently dropped, indicating that the US medical profession more widely did not share his enthusiasm for OH. 65 Mahr was more successful in persuading his colleagues in the AVMA, who passed their own resolution supporting OH. They also established a One Health Commission to investigate ways of improving veterinarymedical collaborations and moving the agenda forward, chaired by Lonnie King, one of the 2002 Schwabe symposium contributors. In parallel, Laura Kahn, Thomas Monath and Bruce Kaplan formed the One Health Initiative, an unfunded advocacy group dedicated to making the case for OH. Kahn is a physician based at Princeton University who by 2006 was already working on biosecurity and the risks of pandemic disease. 66 Kaplan had worked on food-borne illnesses for the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) before his retirement, and Monath is a physician and consultant working in the pharmaceutical industry. 67 The OH Initiative quickly launched a website and organized a series of meetings and publications on OH/OM, including a piece entitled 'Confronting Zoonoses' co-authored by Kahn and Kaplan with veterinary public health pioneer James H. Steele (whose role in the 1948 establishment of the WHO's Veterinary Public Health 64 Mahr (2006) , Enserink (2007) . 65 Kahn and Davis (2008) . 66 Kahn (2006) . 67 Monath et al. (2010). unit is described in Chapter 4.) 68 When the OH Commission published its report in 2008, it acknowledged the central influence of Schwabe's VMHH, cited Zinsstag et al.'s Lancet paper, the literature on emerging infectious diseases and the OH Initiative's publications. However, it did not cite the WCS veterinarians, instead tracing their influences directly back to Schwabe and OM-a move which emphasized veterinary medicine and de-emphasized environments and wildlife. 69 The differences between the OH Initiative and WCS versions of OH are reflected in the imagery used by each group: unlike the WCS's 'parade' of humans and other animals, the OH Initiative's logo depicts the twinned icons of human and veterinary medicine in front of planet Earth. 70 This signals that for the Initiative-as for the Commission-OH is a project for changing professional relationships that is grounded in and legitimized by human-animal health relationships. Its assumption that closer veterinary-medical partnerships are universally relevant and beneficial perha