One Health = One Way to Mitigate Monkeypox, COVID-19, Ebola, Influenza, and Zika
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Christopher Eddy, M.P.H., REHS, CP-FS
07.23.2020
This morning World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghrebeyesus broke the consensus vote of the International Health Regulations Committee.1 He single-handedly declared the global Monkeypox epidemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)2. He simultaneously exonerated the reputation of global health agency, still bruised by criticism regarding decision making leading to the standing PHEIC (the COVID-19 Pandemic), while establishing a bold example that evidence-based public health decision-making must prevail against the influence of political and social stigma-based complacency.
While WHO has our attention focused on the seriousness of COVID-19 and Monkeypox, not to mention other major infectious disease threats, such as Ebola, Influenza, and Zika,3 we must again realize the importance of the One Health Approach. As we have advocated in the forthcoming, “A Retrospective of the 3.11 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster in Year 3 of the COVID-19 Pandemic — presenting the All-Hazards Emergency Management & Public Health Crisis Cycle” (Journal of Environmental Health): “A One Health Approach to collecting situational awareness data across human, animal, plant, and environmental health” [is accomplished] by focusing upon surveillance and intelligence systems to early detect counterterrorism and global epidemics/pandemics, and assure food defense and security” (ASPR, 2019).
In our paper, “The Zika virus threat and prevention challenges: “An all hazards and one health approach to pandemic and global epidemic prevention and mitigation”; https://mail.neha.org/node/62175 , we addressed public health prevention considerations common-place in public health practice, but that are nearly taboo in our society causing some health officials to be reluctant to discuss them, such as fecal-oral disease transmission pathways, and person-to-person infection processes that involve sexual contact. From another paper, “An all-hazards approach to pandemic COVID-19: clarifying pathogen transmission pathways towards the public health response,” we specifically addressed disease transmission early-incident: “In several studies performed during the 2003 SARS…
