One Health

The future of healthcare combines aspects from human medicine, veterinary medicine, and environment research. Instead of functioning as individual branches, physicians, veterinarians, and environmentalists are working together and accelerating research developments, improving public awareness, and ultimately saving more lives. In this article, the relationship between animal healthcare and poverty are discussed. With livestock being the livelihood of around 70% of laborers, their well-being is essential for the farmer’s success. In well-developed countries, billions of dollars are spent maintaining the global animal health care market (companion and livestock), but for developing countries, the healthcare of animals suffer and they do not receive adequate funding for vaccination programs and research. Animal diseases are a growing concern from a financial and medical aspect: many of the diseases are zoonotic and also decrease productivity/restrict market access. Scientists are working together to develop vaccines or other preventative technologies against infectious diseases as well as allow them to be utilized by poorer sectors of society. Though efforts are being made, providing sufficient care for animals in areas of the world with very little money is a relentless struggle.  I chose this article because I sat in on a series of lectures last semester in College Station discussing the advancements and increasing success of an organization known as One Health. This article discusses efforts made from all three branches of this organization and I thought it was interesting to see it being utilized globally.

http://www.sciencemag.org.lib-ezproxy.tamu.edu:2048/content/315/5810/333.full