Veterinarians between the Frontlines?! The Concept of One Health and Three Frames of Health in Veterinary Medicine

Abstract

The BOne Health^initiative promises to combine different health-related issues concerning humans and animals in an overarching concept and in related practices to the benefit of both humans and animals. Far from dismissing One Health, this paper nevertheless argues that different veterinary interventions are determined by social practices and connected expectations and are, thus, hardly compliant with only one single conceptualization of health, as the One Health concept suggests. One Health relies on a naturalistic understanding of health focusing on similar bodies that show a similar etiology. However, logics, normativity, and practices exhibit differences when it comes to combatting infectious diseases, maintaining productivity of livestock animals or preventing companion animals from suffering. Therefore, drawing from Charles Rosenberg's groundbreaking texts on framing disease, we suggest to conceive of health as dispersed in different frames. Thus, this paper proposes to interpret health as complex and multi-layered concept. We distinguish and introduce an objectivist, a functional, and a sentientistic frame of health. Instead of reducing the differential veterinary practices to one paradigmatic understanding, health is seen as a model case of Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance. Different and distinct perspectives on veterinary medicine show sufficient overlapping that allows for a common conceptualization, but there is not one single underlying logic suitable to understand and ethically reflect all veterinary interventions. This differentiability promises to reduce moral stress in veterinary professionals since it allows the interpretation of various, seemingly contradicting practices as dependent on multi-layered and socially determined scopes of responsibility.

Multi-Drug and β-Lactam Resistance in Escherichia coli and Food-Borne Pathogens from Animals and Food in Portugal, 2014–2019

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The Rise of Heatstroke as a Method of Depopulating Pigs and Poultry: Implications for the US Veterinary Profession

“…The Guidelines state that the AVMA's guidance documents on euthanasia or slaughter, rather than depopulation, should be used for "precautionary killing" or "prophylactic culling". These terms typically refer to killing of healthy animals to prevent spread of disease [28], but are left undefined in the Guidelines.…”

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“…So-called political or ethical consumerism in industrialised countries (Micheletti 2006), driven forward by consumers and NGOs, and amplified through the choice editors of supermarket chains, is putting animal welfare, sustainability, environmental degradation, and food waste on food policy agendas, resulting in emerging niche markets and new certification labels. 4 Holistic thinking has entered food policy debates through concepts such as the One Health approach/movement, which links human, animal, and environmental health (Huth et al 2019; van Herten and Meijboom 2019), and Food Sovereignty, which aims at culturally adapted control of mechanisms and distribution of food by those who produce, distribute and consume foods (Rosset 2008). Countries have established effective institutions to guard food safety issues (e.g., the Food and Drug Administration in the USA and the European Food Safety Agency in Europe), which have resulted in improvements to food safety, though various foodborne diseases still represent significant problems even in industrialised nations (EFSA and ECDC 2018).…”