Emerging Global Health Approaches at the Human-Animal Interface

Abstract

The vagueness of the term one health is the result of multiple developments that it has brought together. Therefore, a historical and conceptual analysis, divided in three sections, is performed for understanding these tensions and their backgrounds. First, an account of different and changing attitudes towards animals and their health is given, especially in religion, modern philosophy, and pre-modern dealing with disease supposedly caused by animals and plants. The second part reconstructs early bacteriology as a search for environmental disease factors and a struggle with zoonoses in a globalized research effort. The final and largest section analyses the development of international policies on zoonoses and one health from the 1950s until today, sketching the way from a veterinarian and medical national public health issue via socio-economic perspectives to the perception of a global threat by emerging diseases which fueled inter-agency cooperation in an unprecedented manner.