One Health

The World Health Organization defines One Health as an integrated, unifying approach that balances and optimises the health of people, animals, plants and ecosystems. The point is not that the four are related in the abstract. It is that they are close enough in practice that a problem in one cannot be solved without the others. More than 60 percent of emerging infectious diseases start in animals, and human activity, urbanisation, farming and the clearing of habitat, keeps creating conditions in which pathogens cross more easily between species.

The practical consequence is shared surveillance and shared disease-control plans across sectors that would otherwise each keep their own records. Rabies is the clearest case. The disease kills people but it is controlled in dogs, so the health ministry treating the bites and the livestock ministry running the vaccination campaigns have to work to one target. When the World Health Organization validated Bhutan in September 2026 as having eliminated dog-mediated human rabies, it credited more than a decade of investment in exactly that arrangement, carried forward by an inter-ministerial committee on One Health.