Not Separating People, Animals and the Environment
Four Agencies Sign a One Health Declaration for the Americas

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To mark World Zoonoses Day on July 6, four international agencies — the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), WOAH (World Organisation for Animal Health), PAHO/WHO (Pan American Health Organization), and UNEP (UN Environment Programme) — signed a joint declaration to strengthen their commitment to the One Health approach in the Americas. It is a declaration to protect the health of people, animals and the environment not separately but as a single system. This is said to be the first time these four agencies have aligned so closely in Latin America, and to me, as someone who has been following health and public health, it looked like a quiet but solid step.

What happened

The signing took place on World Zoonoses Day itself, a day set aside to refocus attention on diseases shared between animals and people. The heart of the declaration is that four agencies with entirely different remits — the FAO (food and agriculture), WOAH (animal health), PAHO/WHO (human health), and UNEP (the environment) — put their names on a single document. It is a statement of intent to build a structure that faces, together, the problems that slip through the cracks when you look only at human medicine, only at livestock, or only at the environment.

Zoonoses are not the only thing the declaration covers. Food safety risks, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution and the degradation of ecosystems are all lined up as cross-cutting challenges that feed into one another. The idea is not to strike down individual diseases one by one, but to rethink the very ground that produces them. There is already movement at the national level: in June, Uruguay announced that it had strengthened its national preparedness against avian influenza (H5N1) within a One Health framework. This declaration also serves to back up such individual efforts at the regional level.

Context

Behind the words "One Health" lie a few numbers. Roughly 60% of human infectious diseases are said to be zoonoses of animal origin, and about 75% of newly emerging diseases originate in wildlife or livestock. In other words, even if you treat only the human side, the source of infection itself remains on the side of animals and the environment. To monitor, respond and prevent by treating people, animals and the environment as one loop — that is the idea at the center of One Health.

Turning to the Americas, foodborne illness alone claims roughly 78,000 lives a year here, part of the 1.5 million foodborne deaths worldwide. On top of that, Latin America, including the Amazon, is a region where deforestation and biodiversity loss are advancing. The more the forest is cleared, the shorter the distance to wildlife that people had no contact with before, and the more entry points open for new diseases to jump across to humans. The limits of completing infectious-disease surveillance on the human side alone were confirmed painfully during the pandemic. Behind the declaration lies this shared recognition that "watching people alone is no longer enough."

The question

A declaration as a principle matters, but the real difficulty lies beyond it, at the stage of implementation. In Latin America, human medicine, animal health and environmental administration each run through separate ministries, separate budgets and separate information systems — a stubborn "siloing" — and experts point out that building a practical mechanism to share data on the ground is not easy in itself. Even if the four signatory agencies align upstream, that coordination will not necessarily be reproduced as-is within each country.

The other issue is inequality within the region. In rural areas and remote places far from the cities, access to human medicine is already limited, and surveillance struggles to reach. Surveillance that also takes in animals and the environment is harder still, and the thinner the resources of a place, the more easily "invisible blank spots" appear. Bringing the four agencies together should make it easier to coordinate budgets and technical support, but the test from here will be how far concrete country-by-country action plans, and the funding to sustain them, are actually put in place. The declaration is a starting point, not a destination.

My perspective

Seen from someone who has researched the edges of social security, including the system that funds assistive devices, what concerns me most in the One Health debate is the question of "who gets left behind first." Infectious disease looks as though it falls on everyone equally, but in reality people with disabilities or chronic illness face a higher risk of severe outcomes and find it harder to seek care or to evacuate. The more easily someone slips through the mesh of the system, the earlier and the more heavily they are hit by a wave of disease. It is precisely when we draw a large framework of people, animals and the environment that we are asked whether we can explicitly bring the "vulnerable" inside it into view.

Looking back on my days living in Costa Rica, I feel that the underlying strength of Latin American health care was supported less by the grandeur of the system itself than by the part that community health workers and frontline staff have knit together through human relationships. From my experience meeting people with disabilities as a physical therapist, what ultimately matters is how to weave the circumstances of each individual — which never show up in a statistical average — into the design of surveillance and prevention. The cross-cutting view of One Health has, if we choose to use it, a reach that can extend all the way to "protecting socially vulnerable people, alongside animals and the environment." Can we translate this joint declaration into a mechanism that reaches the weakest points, rather than letting it end as a handshake between expert agencies? That is what I want to keep watching.

Glossary

Una Salud = "One Health" in Spanish; literally "one health," it refers to the way of thinking that grasps the health of people, animals and the environment without separating them. zoonosis = a zoonotic disease, an infection that moves back and forth between animals and people; it is the concept from which this declaration set out. vigilancia = surveillance; in disease control it is a foundational word, since it determines how quickly you can notice something out of the ordinary.

Disease crosses the barrier between species. If so, the response must cross that barrier too.

※ This article is the author’s commentary based on public information. Please confirm the latest figures, dates and procedures with governments and primary sources. Quotations are kept minimal and sources are cited.