The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Department of the Interior (DOI) created the “One Health Framework” to prepare for future diseases.
The “collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary” program “seeks to improve the health of humans, animals, and the environment by recognizing their close connections,” a statement from the CDC says.
One Health is designed to be a framework to “address zoonotic disease and advance public health preparedness in the U.S.,” a page on the program says.
The plan calls for pathogen surveillance: “Combining surveillance data with genomic information from both human and animal samples through One Health investigations of SARS-CoV-2 infections in people and animals have helped improve our understanding of how COVID-19 affects different animal species, virus transmission, the potential for variant emergence in people and animals, and the potential role of animals in spreading the virus.”
One Health’s “guiding principles” include health equity, sustainability, stewardship, and multisectoral and transdisciplinary collaboration, according to a document on the framework.
“Achieving health equity requires focused and ongoing societal efforts to address historical and contemporary injustices, overcome obstacles to health and healthcare, and eliminate preventable health differences adversely affecting socially, economically, or environmentally disadvantaged groups,” the document says.
The document further calls to “strengthen coordinated surveillance and information sharing for zoonotic disease surveillance and other One Health-relevant surveillance and reporting systems across sectors.” This includes expanding current surveillance system evaluations.
Meanwhile, the CDC has urged labs to accelerate bird flu testing. “Clinicians and laboratorians are reminded to test for influenza in patients with suspected influenza and, going forward, to now expedite the subtyping of influenza A-positive specimens from hospitalized patients, particularly those in an intensive care unit (ICU),” an alert reads.
