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

Abstract

In 2002 the US-based Association for Veterinary Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine (AVEPM) co-organized a symposium in St. Louis, Missouri, to honour the lifetime achievements of Calvin W. Schwabe, who had served as professor of epidemiology in both the medical and veterinary schools of the University of California, Davis until his retirement in 1991. 1 At the symposium, Schwabe gave a keynote address summarizing his ideas about how veterinary medicine should relate to other disciplines-particularly human medicine-and the wider world. Arguing against the compartmentalization of medicine by species, into human and veterinary strands, he used the opportunity to restate his longstanding arguments for a philosophy of One Medicine (OM), which sees veterinary medicine as a close collaborative partner with human medicine, working together towards the broader endeavours of healthcare and furthering knowledge in the life sciences. 2 He claimed that this positioning reflected and recognized the contributions that veterinary medicine made to a range of other fields, including comparative zoology, parasitology, epidemiology, human public health, agriculture CHAPTER 6

The One Medicine concept: its emergence from history as a systematic approach to re-integrate human and veterinary medicine

“…Although 'One Medicine' has been thought to be self-explanatory [3], or synonymous to 'One Health', the two terms are distinct from each other [4]. Currently, there is no universal standard definition for either 'One Health [5], or 'One Medicine'.…”

“…One Health's current interpretation has existed since 2003, but the history of its precursor, One Medicine, goes back much further [3], its origins having been covered previously in reviews e.g. Cardiff et al [7], Zinsstag et al [8] and Mobasheri [9].…”

“…In the 1960s, its most notable exponent, Calvin Schwabe, attempted to re-integrate the medical and veterinary disciplines and is credited with coining the term 'One Medicine' [14,19]. In the UK, the most notable exponent advocating the integration of human and animal health was Lord Lawson Soulsby, a veterinary surgeon who worked in the areas of microbiology and parasitology and who bridged both the medical and veterinary professions [3].…”

The concept of One Health: Cultural context, background & prospects in India

“…He argued that medicine and health science should not be compartmentalized according to species because advances from consideration of each inevitably contributed to the other. His ideas in the 1960s germinated from his experience in Lebanon as a consultant on parasitology for WHO and while working at the American University of Beirut 10 . He first used the term One Medicine to explain his views in the third edition of his textbook, Veterinary Medicine and Human Health , in 1984, though not in the earlier editions in 1964 and 1969 11 .…”

Re-thinking public health: Towards a new scientific logic of routine animal health care in European industrial farming

“…In this article, we demonstrate that the social regime underpinning scientific research and development on CADM in Europe encourages a logic of routine animal health care in industrial farming which intersects the risk of disease emergence and pandemics by influencing the ways in which researchers (in this case, animal health scientists or 'AHS') explore, understand, and guide CADM in industrial farming. What AHS choose to focus on, include or exclude from their research, analyses and discourses on chronic animal health conditions embodies a 'social decision' (Wallace andWallace, 2015, p. 2077) and 'sociocultural meanings' (Lupton, 2000, p. 52) that have significant implications for the ways chronic animal diseases are comprehended and managed in industrial settings (Cassidy, 2017;Enticott and Ward, 2020). Adding new animal-oriented insights to extant research in the sociology of medical knowledge (Foucault, 1975(Foucault, , 1989Fairclough, 1992;Lupton, 1994Lupton, , 2000Mol, 2008), we draw upon Latimer's (2019) concept of 'science under siege' to examine the underlying norms and values governing the production of scientific knowledge on CADM and explore 'conditions of possibility (p. 264) for a new scientific logic of routine animal health care that reorients industrial practices toward 'more-than-human solidarity' in public health (Rock and Degeling, 2015).…”