The “One Health” concept focuses equally on the well-being of people, animals and the environment. It's not just pandemics like Corona that show how important such an approach is. Everyone can contribute to its implementation on their own plate, explains Hendrik Lasch in this article from Slow Food Magazine 05-2024.
Together with friends, Rupert Ebner looks after a herd of around 50 Murnau-Werdenfels cattle: an old breed native to Upper Bavaria that is one of the passengers on Slow Food's Ark of Taste and has robust health. The mother cows gave birth to around 500 calves in a decade and a half, says Ebner, who is not only the new chairman of Slow Food Germany, but also still practices as a veterinarian in the Ingolstadt region. He has only had to use antibiotics twice in all these years: “It's necessary for navel infections.” Otherwise, a stable immune system and good husbandry and feeding of the animals ensure that this type of medication can be avoided.
»Under the term One Health, experts have been trying for around 20 years to take a joint look at the health and well-being of people and animals as well as the state of the environment.«
To a certain extent, the herd embodies the claim of “One Health” (meaning: one, comprehensive health). Using this term, experts have been trying to take a joint look at the health and well-being of humans and animals as well as the state of the environment for around 20 years. As early as 1964, the American veterinarian Calvin Schwabe explained the relationships between “veterinary medicine and human health” in a textbook. In 2004, the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society published twelve “Manhattan Principles” that served as the basis for the concept OneHealth apply. Humans and their health are seen as part of the animal kingdom. Important topics include infectious diseases that spread from animals to people – and the use of antibiotics.
Antibiotics in animal husbandry – a dangerous trend
When Rupert Ebner trained as a veterinarian four decades ago, these medical ingredients were just beginning to triumph in German stables. Since the 1940s, antibiotics have helped to combat a variety of bacterial, previously often fatal, infectious diseases in humans. Its first known representative was penicillin, discovered in 1928 by the British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming. Now the now very inexpensive antibiotics were also used on a large scale in animal husbandry: for therapy, but also as growth promoters. “That was considered progressive at the time,” says Ebner.
Today it is clear that this path is likely to lead to ruin. In his book “Pills before the Swine”, which Ebner published in 2021 together with Eva Rosenkranz, he warns of the impending “greatest health crisis” and a “post-antibiotic age” in which people will die again from banal inflammation and many of today's routine operations could no longer be carried out: “We are moving into a medieval future.” The reason for this is that more and more pathogens are becoming resistant to antibiotics more and more quickly.
“Killer germs are being bred in the stables, which, experts warn, will soon cost millions of lives.”
In addition to improper use in humans, the main trigger is the widespread use of antibiotics in industrial livestock farming, where not individual sick animals but entire herds are treated prophylactically. This makes it much easier for germs to develop defense mechanisms. “Killer germs” are being bred in the stables, which, experts warn, will soon cost millions of lives.
Warnings have been around for some time. 20 years ago, around the same time as the “One Health” idea was being developed in New York, German health insurance companies called for more careful use of antibiotics in human and veterinary medicine, citing increasing resistance. Since 2010 it has been forbidden to use the active ingredients for animal fattening, “but this is circumvented through a number of back doors,” says Ebner.
Tip: You can read more about this in our article “Antibiotics in factory farming: What do the statistics (really) say?”
The issue of antibiotics and resistance is now a concern for the G7 group of the largest industrial nations and the UN General Assembly, which is calling for decisive action. However, sweeping successes are still a long way off.
When Greenpeace examined pig manure spread on German fields in 2017, active antibiotic ingredients were detected in 79 percent of the samples. In the same year, researchers discovered for the first time a bacterium that was “resistant to everything,” writes Ebner, and comes to the conclusion: “The countdown is on.”
Zoonoses: Danger to humans and animals
Of course, dangers lurk not only because animals and people are given the same medications to keep bacteria in check. Common diseases are also tricky because their pathogens – viruses, bacteria, fungi and others – jump between them. For this reason, almost 700 residents in the Bavarian municipality of Maithenbeth were examined in July 2022 – as well as 157 shrews, including 16 field shrews. The latter are carriers of an infection called Bornash disease caused by a virus, which leads to severe brain inflammation and is almost always fatal.
For a long time it was assumed that only animals such as horses and sheep were affected. Since 2018 it has been clear that it also occurs in humans. But because it is considered extremely rare, experts took notice when two cases occurred in Maithenbeth within three years.
The large-scale study was intended to find out whether other people might have had undetected illness by examining nasal swabs and blood samples. It should also be clarified how widespread the pathogen is in the Maithenbeth mouse population. Researchers from the Fritz Löffler Institute for Animal Health examined dead field mice and soil from mouse holes. The study has since been considered a prime example of an approach based on the principles of One Health.
“In the professional world, the One Health approach brought increased interdisciplinary interest in zoonoses, i.e. infectious diseases that affect animals and humans and spread between them.”
Collaborations between human and veterinary medicine and experts from other disciplines are likely to become more common in the future. In the professional world, the One Health approach brought increased interdisciplinary interest in zoonoses, i.e. infectious diseases that affect animals and humans and spread between them. With Corona, the topic has reached the general public. “Now it’s no longer a niche phenomenon,” says Ebner. The pathogen that causes Covid-19 is believed to have circulated in bats before humans were infected.
Similar cases abound. Two thirds of known human infectious diseases originally came from animals, according to a publication by the Federal Environment Agency on the subject of One Health. Many can cause epidemics. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global emergency in August this year due to a rapid increase in illnesses caused by a new variant of the Mpox virus that spreads from rodents to humans. At the same time, experts are watching with concern how the bird flu virus is spreading in cowsheds in the USA – and in some cases has already spread to people.
Of course, all of these diseases are about more than just pathogens that pass from animals to people. It's also about the question of what opportunities they get to do this. People are “increasingly pushing into untouched areas” and are creating “new opportunities for the spread of pathogens” through changing land use and destruction of habitats, write scientists from the Federal Environment Agency and the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in a special issue of the Federal Health Gazette on One Health published in 2023. Worldwide travel and global trade ensure that these spread at a rapid pace.
“A bit like world peace”: The implementation of the One Health concept
The One Health approach, which, with its recently increased focus on the state of ecosystems, increasingly overlaps with the concept of “Planetary Health”, is intended to help address such problems in an interdisciplinary and systematic manner. The aim was to “achieve optimal results for health and well-being, taking into account the connections between people, animals, plants and their shared environment,” said the “One Health Commission” in 2020 – one of now numerous committees and institutions dedicated to the topic .
In 2021, a global “One Health High-Level Expert Panel” consisting of 26 international experts was founded. In 2022, a “One Health Joint Plan of Action” was presented, backed by the World Organization for Animal Health, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the UN Environment Program and the WHO. The term is now on everyone's lips in the EU and in federal politics. An international One Health Day, which takes place annually on November 3rd, is intended to attract widespread attention to the topic.
“It sounds good, no one has anything against it, but the path to get there is complex.”
To what extent practical steps will follow from all of this remains to be seen. One Health is “a bit like world peace,” the prominent doctor and science journalist Eckart von Hirschhausen teased at the World Health Summit: “It sounds good, no one has anything against it, but the path to get there is complex.” So far, Rupert Ebner has heard a lot of “Sunday speeches,” but a rather half-hearted implementation of the noble words: “It's like the priests and chastity.” When, for example, practical consequences are required of human and veterinary medicine when it comes to antibiotics, “everyone points to the other first.”
Ebner sees his own discipline as a much greater responsibility. Antibiotics may only be administered if it is “really medically indicated,” which authorities should also monitor. He adds that industrial animal husbandry cannot be maintained under such conditions: “It doesn't work without the mass use of antibiotics.”
Beyond international committees and scientific debates, each individual can of course contribute to the implementation of the One Health idea – for example through the type of diet. Ebner emphasizes that it is about “food whose production does not destroy the planet and animals do not have to suffer.” And a diet that consists largely of plant-based ingredients that come from environmentally friendly cultivation. And only a significantly smaller proportion of meat and animal products are included – from well-kept animals. Like the Murnau-Werdenfels cattle, which are slaughtered after a life on Upper Bavarian pastures without ever having to be treated with antibiotics or cured.
