A framework for One Health research

Lebov, J.; Grieger, K.; Womack, D.; Zaccaro, D.; Whitehead, N.; Kowalcyk, B.; MacDonald, P.D.M.

The OH approach to research provides an opportunity for enhanced understanding of a range of health impacts and solutions. By looking at multiple dimensions of the problem through the lens of environmental, animal, and human health, researchers may discover influencing factors that they would not have otherwise seen, which can facilitate more informed intervention design. In 2015, the World Health Organization designated 11 diseases as high risk for severe outbreak, ten of which have a zoonotic reservoir or transmission vector [2] . An OH approach to studying these diseases may be able to provide more complete information about opportunities for outbreak prevention than a traditional one-dimensional approach. For example, a Lassa fever prevention intervention which targets the environmental (e.g. improved household sanitation) and animal (e.g. rodent removal) domains may show promise, but omission of the human domain (e.g. education of nurses on disposal of contaminated material in hospitals) may result in a missed opportunity to achieve optimum results. At worst, siloed approaches may lead to unforeseen detrimental effects. In the Lassa fever example, removal of rodent populations may result in increased malnutrition among humans if rodents were a significant direct or indirect (i.e. prey for larger food source animals) source of protein for families living in affected communities. The ultimate goal of OH research is to identify opportunities for health improvement and optimize risk mitigation simultaneously across all three domains [3] .