A review of the One Health concept and its application as a tool for policy-makers

Review Article

International Journal of One Health, 6(1): 83-89

https://doi.org/10.14202/IJOH.2020.83-89

Rodrigo de Macedo Couto¹ and Danie Friguglietti Brandespim²

1. Department of Epidemiology, Faculdade de Saúde Pública, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Paulo/SP, 04024-002, Brazil.
2. Departament of Veterinary Medicine, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco (UFRPE), Recife/PE, 52171-900, Brazil.

Background and Aim: The One Health concept represents the inseparability of human, animal, and environmental health through a unified view of health care. This article addressed the topic of public health policies from the One Health perspective, demonstrating its inclusion in various health agendas such as emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, basic sanitation, mental health, chronic non-communicable diseases, interpersonal violence, and food safety. The results showed that the application of the One Health concept to the development and implementation of policies is associated with a growing need to involve transdisciplinary teams for solving complex problems to improve communication and to ensure the relevance and acceptability of public policies, thus guaranteeing governance. According to the principle of efficiency, the government must be aware of the evolution of technical knowledge and should use the One Health approach to improve the efficacy of already existing systems. We, therefore, conducted this review to contextualize current knowledge in this topic which is becoming an essential tool for public health policy-makers and practitioners around the world promoting a reflection on the importance of multiprofessional articulation in the implementation of intersectoral public health policies.

Keywords: One Health, public administration, public health, public health policies, sustainability.

How to cite this article: de Macedo Couto R, Brandespim DF (2020) A review of the One Health concept and its application as a tool for policy-makers, Int. J. One Health, 6(1): 83-89.

Received: 22-02-2020 Accepted: 15-05-2020 Published online: 24-06-2020

Corresponding author: Rodrigo de Macedo Couto E-mail: rodrigoscouto@hotmail.com

DOI: 10.14202/IJOH.2020.83-89

Copyright: Brandespim This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.