One Health
Cross-disciplinary health framework recognising that human, animal, and environmental health are interconnected.
Last refreshed: 7 May 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Why does African AMR laboratory capacity require a One Health approach rather than human health alone?
Timeline for One Health
Applied as the integrating framework for ARILAC's human and veterinary AMR surveillance
Pandemics and Biosecurity: Africa CDC and EU launch ARILAC for AMR- What does One Health mean in practice?
- One Health means designing surveillance, policy, and intervention across human, animal, and environmental health simultaneously, rather than in separate public health and veterinary silos. In practice, it means the same laboratory network monitors antibiotic resistance in cattle and in hospital patients, because resistance genes move between both.Source: WHO / FAO / WOAH
- Why does ARILAC use a One Health approach for AMR testing?
- Antibiotic resistance genes circulate through livestock, wastewater, and clinical settings as one connected ecology. An AMR laboratory that only tests human samples misses the animal and environmental pathways driving resistance. ARILAC integrates human and veterinary microbiology to track the full resistance circuit.Source: Africa CDC
- How does One Health apply to bird flu monitoring in dairy farms?
- H5N1 in US dairy farms is a One Health problem: the virus moves from wild birds to cattle to milk, to parlour aerosols, and potentially to farm workers. Tracking it through separate USDA animal and CDC human databases creates a visibility gap at the animal-to-human interface, which the Emory aerosol study made visible in May 2026.Source: PLOS Biology / Emory University
Background
One Health is an integrated approach to health policy and research that recognises the interdependence of human health, animal health, and environmental health. The concept formalised through WHO, FAO, and WOAH (the World Organisation for Animal Health) collaboration over the 2000s, drawing on evidence that most emerging infectious diseases originate at the human-animal interface. Antimicrobial resistance, avian influenza, Ebola, Nipah, hantaviruses, and SARS-CoV-2 all originated from zoonotic spillover events or antibiotic use in livestock; One Health argues that surveillance, governance, and intervention must be designed to operate across the human-animal-environment boundary rather than within separate health silos.
One Health is the integrating framework for ARILAC, the Africa CDC-EU laboratory capacity programme launched in Addis Ababa on 6 May 2026, which routes AMR diagnostic capacity through both human and veterinary laboratories on the basis that resistance genes circulate through livestock, wastewater, and clinical settings as a single ecology. The framework is equally relevant to H5N1, where surveillance of dairy cattle, wild birds, and human occupational cases constitutes a single epidemiological problem that USDA, CDC, and state health departments are currently tracking through separate and asynchronous data streams. The Emory aerosol study documented H5N1 in milking-parlour air and pre-symptomatic milk tanks, a finding that only makes sense in a monitoring framework that tracks the virus from the animal host through the farm environment to the human worker.
