One Health Surveillance in Practice: Experiences of Integration among Human Health, Animal Health, Environmental Health, and Food Safety Sectors

Book excerpt: Recognizing that the human and animal health are interconnected brings along the challenge of integrating their respective health systems, including routine disease surveillance activities, outbreak management, and emergency preparedness. However, approaches in these different sectors are still unaligned in many ways, including their respective agendas, both at the country and the supranational levels. Several initiates have been launched to study and tackle this problem. Since the early 2000s, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the World Organization of Animal Health (OIE) paved the road of multi-sectorial One Health approaches and collaborations, leading to the recent publication of the Tripartite Zoonoses Guide. In Europe, the “One Health European Joint Programme” aims at fostering the transdisciplinary cooperation of activities that are relevant to One Health within and across European countries. Furthermore, various scientific networks and consortia have been set up to bring together professionals and experiences from different sectors. Integration is key to the One Health agenda, and to the challenge of future preparedness and response to foodborne pathogens and other emerging threats, both from an epidemiological and microbiological perspective. This Research Topic aims at describing first-hand, successful, inspirational (and possibly visionary), experiences about the integration of approaches, procedures and methodologies for One Health surveillance across the human health, animal health, environmental health, and food safety sectors, at the local, national, or supranational levels.