One Health
– Dr. Rudolf Virchow recognizes the link between human and animal health and advocated for improved veterinary education.
– Dr. William Osler, considered Father of Veterinary of Pathology in North America, also became interested in the link between human and veterinary medicine. He authored the publication titled, “The Relation of Animals to Man.”
– The Veterinary Public Health Division is established at CDC and the principles of veterinary public health were introduced to the United States and other countries around the world.
– Calvin Schwabe coins the term “One Medicine” and calls for a unified approach against zoonoses that uses both human and veterinary medicine.
Achieving harmonized approaches for disease detection and prevention is difficult because traditional boundaries of medical and veterinary practice must be crossed. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, this was not the case: researchers like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, and physicians like William Osler and Rudolph Virchow, crossed the boundaries between animal and human health.
This is a species-spanning medical practice and collaboration, not only in the area of zoonoses or inter-species infection by pathogens, but also when it comes to diseases and issues usually categorized as nonzoonotic, such as tetralogy of Fallot (a congenital heart disease), infiltrative heart diseases, heart murmurs in macaws, congestive heart failure in dogs, dilated cardiomyopathy in dogs, neoplasms, acquired metabolic disorders necessitating medical procedures by physicians and veterinary colleagues, non-infectious diseases, carcinomas, sexually transmitted diseases, as well as transmissible sarcomas. This is a mutually beneficial paradigm in that one field may benefit from the advancement of the other.
Human and animal health has been threatened by antimicrobial resistance, environmental pollution, and the development of multifactorial and chronic diseases. Some, such as the recent SARS-COV-2, are believed to be an example of new diseases. As Rudolph Virchow, Father of Modern Pathology, said unequivocally, “Between animal and human medicine, there is no dividing line, nor should there be. The object is different, but the experiences obtained constitutes the basis of all medicine.”
I have talked to all kinds of tertiary-level experts in human medicine – cardiologists, oncologists, interventional radiologists, neurologists, gastroenterologists, pulmonologists, OBGYNS, rehabilitation medical doctors, even diagnosticians, ophthalmologists, and molecular epidemiologists – many of whom are my friends, while others are either acquaintances or strangers, and almost always, I get the same surprised reaction from them at the resemblance of terminologies veterinarians use.
A physician friend was surprised when I said we also used Arthur Guyton and John E. Hall’s physiology textbook. The science of bodily function is quite similar in both fields.
The Ebola virus causes a rare but serious viral infection. It is highly fatal if left untreated. The virus caused two simultaneous outbreaks in 1976: one in South Sudan and in a village near the Ebola River after which the disease was named.
According to the WHO, fruit bats are thought to be natural Ebola virus hosts. Transmission occurs when humans come into “close contact with the blood, secretions, organs, or other bodily fluids of infected animals like fruit bats, chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, forest antelope or porcupines found ill or dead or in the rainforest.”
The virus spreads human to human through direct contact with the blood or bodily fluids of (and even objects belonging to) a person who is infected or has died from Ebola.