PUBH5400: One Health

The One Health unit explores the vast landscape of disease transmission among humans, animals, and their ecosystems. This unit has a strong focus on zoonotic diseases, which are those infections that can be transmitted from animals to humans, but also explores disease transmission more broadly through ecosystems. The unit first defines the biological, ecological, environmental, social, and economic contexts of pathogens. Relevant surveillance, analytical, and prevention strategies are then described and applied to several regional and global case studies. Specific case studies will include anthrax, avian influenza, hemorrhagic fevers, Henipavirus infections, Ross River virus, and Lyme disease. The unit's philosophical and methodological approaches to infectious disease are grounded in the unique One Health paradigm, which recognises the relationships between human, animal, and ecosystem health as inextricably linked and with each foundational to the improvement of all. Students will appreciate how One Health approaches provide exceptional utility in investigating and controlling infectious diseases in urban, peri-urban, and rural contexts especially where human-livestock-wildlife interfaces have emerged from human-altered landscapes. These interfaces currently present some of the world's most significant conduits of emergent disease and therefore delineate critical challenges for global health in the 21st century. Moreover, a better understanding of these interfaces opens intriguing possibilities for leveraging habitat and climate conservation in the interests of public health.