How can ‘One Health’ help India, and India help ‘One Health’

General Studies Paper 2

INTRODUCTION

• The concept of ‘One Health’ is currently gaining popularity worldwide; India has of late been taking significant strides to deploy concepts and strategies rooted in this idea to bolster the way it responds to health crises.

One Health concept

• One Health is a holistic approach to problems that recognises the interconnections between the health of humans, animals, plants, and their shared environment.
• An early articulation can be found in the writings of Hippocrates (460-367 BC), who contemplated the relationships between public health and clean environments.
• The 19th-century German physician and pathologist Rudolf Virchow (1821-1863) later wrote: “Between animal and human medicines there are no dividing lines – nor should there be.”

Specialities

• Human population growth, urbanisation, and industrialisation have compounded the damage to biodiversity and ecosystems.
• These harmful environmental changes are linked to zoonoses – diseases shared between animals and humans.
• Researchers have estimated that 60% of emerging diseases that can infect humans are zoonotic in nature. They include bird flu, Ebola, rabies, and Japanese encephalitis.
• In addition, humankind has also become beset by major issues of antimicrobial resistance, food safety and security, and the control of vector-borne diseases.
• Taken together, these issues warrant both the intersectoral management and the efficiency that characterises the One Health strategy.
• One Health minimises resource requirements across sectors. An important way it does this is by encouraging coordination across governmental units, including the Ministries of Health and Family Welfare, Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Environment, and Science and Technology.
• Taking a One Health approach allows researchers to, for example, share their laboratories and findings, and ultimately make decisions that lead to resilient, sustainable, and predictable policies.

Recent One Health initiatives

• The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2023 highlighted the importance of adopting a One Health approach.
• The Government of India established its ‘Standing Committee on Zoonoses’ in 2006 under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW).
• The Department of Biotechnology launched India’s first consortium on One Health in October 2021.
• In June 2022, the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairy (DAHD) – in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Confederation of Indian Industry – launched a One Health pilot project in Karnataka and Uttarakhand.
• India is also currently preparing for a wider ‘National One Health Mission’ to be spearheaded by the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor.

Ways to implement

• The implementation process can be broken down into four major stages. Each stage requires consistent political will and sustainable financing structures.

Stage 1: Communication

• In this stage, the basic mechanisms for communication between various ministries and/or sectors are set up. The focus is on keeping the important stakeholders informed and engaged throughout the One Health transformation.

Stage 2: Collaboration

• After initiating communication between the relevant sectors, sector members need to exchange their knowledge and expertise in order to translate ideas into short-term interventions.
• Stage 3: Coordination
• The activities carried out during this stage are usually routine and long-term. Initiatives to achieve One Health in this stage are spearheaded by a national or a subnational agency.
• Stage 4: Integration
• By default, government sectors and their units are designed to function vertically – and this is good for managing individual programmes. However, One Health is implicitly intersectoral, and existing system can’t accommodate One Health’s goals and mechanisms if it doesn’t ‘horizontalise’: i.e. it needs to integrate and develop synergies between programmes undertaken across various sectors.

Way forward

• To reap all the advantages of a One Health approach, India should move beyond short-term collaborations and create an integrated, science-based environment.
• This is a prerequisite for platforms to not just share office space but to also provide access to laboratories and biological samples to the relevant researchers.