equis - Articles
One Health, horses and other equine
Synonym(s): One Health, Planetary Health, Ecosystem Health, One Medicine, One Welfare
Introduction
- One Health is an evolving concept that, broadly speaking, calls for collaboration across disciplines to seek optimal health for people, animals and the environment. As such, it sits at the intersection of human, other-than-human-animal health and environmental health.
- Whilst the concept of One Health may initially have been promoted by veterinarians seeking to engage their human medical professional counterparts in a common endeavour, there is now a recognition that the paradigm extends far beyond this limited collaborative project.
- The field of One Health is no longer to be viewed as one involving collaboration between human and veterinary medicine in preventative healthcare and disease control. To understand this, however, there is a need to understand how this paradigmatic shift has arisen and its wider significance and implications.
- Faced by the interdependent polycrises of the Anthropocene, including the climate and nature emergencies, humanity’s relationships with the natural world and with life itself, as well as the health born of these relationships, have been thrown into question.
- This paradigmatic shift is, in many respects, informed by a growing awareness that the health of the planet is unravelling and that the polycrises are, fundamentally, anthropogenic in nature.
- The immense complexity of the health challenges we face requires a radically different approach if we are to shift from tackling symptoms of the polycrises to addressing the root causes. This is in part because, to quote Albert Einstein, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”.
- This thinking is born of the colonialist project that is the industrial growth society and that has now breached a whole series of planetary limits, resulting in ecosystems collapse and a plethora of health crises.
- The One Health paradigm promises to examine the health (in its broadest terms) of humans, other-than-human-animals and the environment under one frame. As such, it aspires to be the ultimate inter- or even trans- disciplinary and holistic framework for understanding, respecting and caring for relationships between different lifeforms.
- This, however, will challenge health care professionals to let go of their specialisms and desire for certainty in order to become more collaborative, open and co-creative.
One Health – An Evolving Approach
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The Network for Evaluation of One Health
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One Health and Comparative Approaches
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One Health, Equines and Infectious Diseases
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One Health and Human-Equine Relations
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One Health, Equines and the Environment
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Further reading
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