What is One Health? One Health is the collaborative effort of multiple health science professions, together with their related disciplines and institutions – working locally, nationally, and globally – to attain optimal health for people, domestic animals, wildlife, plants, and our environment.
When is One Health Day? November 3rd of each year #OneHealth When is One Health Month? January of each year #OneHealthAwareness Month
Why does One Health matter? According to the One Health Commission:
Worldwide, nearly 75 percent of all emerging human infectious diseases in the past three decades originated in animals.
Environmental health may affect human and animal health through contamination, pollution and poor conditions that may lead to new infectious agents.
The world population is projected to grow from 7 billion in 2011 to 9 billion by 2050.
To provide adequate healthcare, food and water for the growing global population, the health professions, and their related disciplines and institutions, must work together.
The human-animal bond beneficially impacts the health of both people and animals.
Can other species be infected by GBS, also known as Streptococcus agalactiae? "Invasive disease due to S. agalactiae is not limited to humans. Other species affected include terrestrial mammals such as cattle, dogs and cats and aquatic or semi-aquatic species such as sea mammals, crocodiles, bullfrogs and fish." Human Streptococcus agalactiae strains in aquatic mammals and fish
Studies regarding GBS transmission between humans and bovines
"Group B streptococcus (GBS), the most significant cause of neonatal bacterial sepsis, is thought to have emerged in the 1960s. GBS also causes mastitis in cows, and there is indirect evidence that human GBS is derived from a bovine ancestor...There is a temporal relationship between the emergence of neonatal GBS disease reports in the UK in the 1960s and a change in cow's milk collection. This finding may be a temporal coincidence or may add support to the notion that human GBS was historically derived from a bovine ancestor." Cow's milk and the emergence of group B streptococcal disease in newborn babies. "A key finding of this investigation is that the serotype III GBS strains isolated from bovine milk in this sample are largely genetically distinct from the serotype III GBS strains that commonly infect humans." Serotype III Streptococcus agalactiae from Bovine Milk and Human Neonatal Infections
"Our findings show that the process of host/niche adaption is an ongoing and dynamic process through time where populations can take divergent evolutionary trajectories to become adapted and specialized to particular hosts or niches. However, populations can reconnect when strains or genes from one population spillover or leak into another." Population gene introgression and high genome plasticity for the zoonotic pathogen Streptococcus agalactiae.
Dr. Timothy Barkham and Dr. Swaine Chen have led the investigation on the foodborne outbreak in SE Asia that has been linked to a particular strain of group B strep causing invasive sepsis in otherwise healthy adults. Please view their superb investigative work in the video presentations below.