Today's era of globalization is characterized by intensified interspecies encounters, growing ecological concerns and the (re-)emergence of infectious diseases, manifesting themselves in the interplay of medical and biological, but also social, cultural and political processes. One health approaches - which combine multidisciplinary efforts to stimulate collaborations between different health professionals such as veterinarians, medical practitioners, biologists, and public health professionals - can be understood as a response to this complex interconnectedness. Integrating a social science perspective might prove beneficial to this endeavor. This essay locates the one health discussion on disease ecologies in a more than human world within recent developments in cultural and medical anthropology that focus on the entanglements between health and a multitude of animals, plants or microbes, as they are characteristic of a globalized modernity. The paper aims to examine the social dimensions of human-animal-disease-interactions, claiming that disease is a biocultural phenomenon and that social factors generally play a crucial role in the emergence, spread and management of (infectious) disease. Consequently, it will be argued that there is a need to rethink our objects of inquiry and any given assumptions of human health, the human body or the constitution of "the global" as such. Incorporating the social sciences into one health approaches can help address topics such as consumption patterns, human-animal behavior or environmental conflicts in a novel way and on a grander scale than ever before. Yet, a greater sensitivity to context may entail some skepticism about the idea of one health - not in spite of the complex entanglements between humans, environments, animals and pathogens, but precisely because of them.

Abstract

Public health authorities in Germany regard communication as a crucial part of infectious disease prevention and control strategies. Communication becomes even more important during public health crises such as pandemics. Drawing on Briggs and Hallin’s concept of biocommunicability, we analysed the German National Pandemic Plan and key informant interviews with public health experts, critical infrastructure providers and ambulance services. We examined the projected expectations towards the behaviour of the audiences and the projected ways of information circulation informing public health communication strategies during a pandemic. Participants shared the expectation that the population would react towards an influenza pandemic with panic and fear due to a lack of information or a sensationalist media coverage. They associated the information uptake of their target audience with trust in their expertise. While our informants from public health conceptualised trust in terms of a face-to-face interaction, they sought to gain trust through transparency in their respective institutional settings. Our analysis suggests that this moved health information into a political register where their medical authority was open to debate. In response to this, they perceived the field of communication as a struggle for hegemony.

No abstract

The results confirm a significant relationship between HRV pre-operatively measured at rest and blood pressure stability during anaesthesia induction in diabetics. Particularly examination of CV, a simple test feasible within few minutes, may be useful in pre-operative risk stratification of these patients. Application of the time consuming traditional test combination to identify CAN seems to be unnecessary.