Links Among Human Health, Animal Health, and Ecosystem Health

Abstract

In the face of growing world human and animal populations and rapid environmental change, the linkages between human, animal, and environmental health are becoming more evident. Because animals and humans have shared risk to health from changing environments, it seems logical to expand the perspective of public health beyond a single species to detect and manage emerging public health threats. Mitigating the effects of climate change, emerging pathogens, toxicant releases, and changes in the built environment requires a retooling of global public health resources and capabilities across multiple species. Furthermore, human and animal health professionals must overcome specific barriers to interprofessional collaboration to implement needed health strategies. This review outlines the relationships between human, animal, and ecosystem health and the public health challenges and opportunities that these links present.

Rodent reservoirs of future zoonotic diseases

“…Collectively, these results may evidence a larger-scale pattern in which synanthropic wildlife species are more likely sources of zoonotic disease in humans (21,22). The majority of current and predicted hyperreservoir species occurs in ecoregions that experience an appreciable degree of seasonality, which concurs with findings from other vertebrate systems that physiological tradeoffs between immunity and reproductive output in temporally dynamic environments may underlie the biogeographical and life history patterns that we find in the most permissive rodent reservoirs (26,27).Clearly, the process of disease emergence from wild reservoirs into human hosts is complex, depending on many interacting factors (4,8,(20)(21)(22)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33). Our methods use a trait-based approach focusing on intrinsic biological traits together with ecological and geographical traits shared among hosts that currently carry zoonotic disease to capture a characteristic profile for zoonotic reservoirs.…”

Applying evolutionary biology to address global challenges

“…4). These connections result from novel biotic interactions due to natural, intentional or inadvertent transport of organisms and their genes by trade, infrastructure, and waste streams (123,124). Further coordination of prevention, control and monitoring will be required to address growing interdependencies among management sectors.…”

One Health: perspectives on ethical issues and evidence from animal experiments

“…This is very different from traditional attitudes of maximizing human health alone. One key type of research that the One Health approach encourages is the use of epidemiological studies of naturally occurring populations using techniques such as case-control and cohort studies to assess correlation between environmental exposures and health risks [4]. One key type of direct disease control and prevention is the use of animal collars and vaccinations [5].…”