A Call for One Health in Medical Education: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Underscores the Need to Integrate Human, Animal, and Environmental Health

Abstract

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the first author, then a fourth-year student at Harvard Medical School, was enrolled in a One Health clinical experience at Zoo New England where he was introduced to a transdisciplinary approach to integrate human, animal, and ecosystem health. Seeing the vast impact of the pandemic and knowing its roots as a zoonotic disease, he realized this approach was critical to his medical education and for preparation against future novel infectious diseases. Zoonotic diseases have been emerging into human populations with increasing frequency,

Towards Ontology-Based Requirements Engineering for IoT-Supported Well-Being, Aging and Health

“…To go another step further, inspired by the concepts of "one health" [58] and "one digital health" [59], as well as the learnings from the current global COVID-19 pandemic [60], the notion of "one well-being, aging and health" (OWBAH) can be introduced, covering WBAH aspects of all living beings and their engagement and interactions within communities and ecosystems. Giving the transdisciplinary nature of this concept, the need for tighter collaboration of human medicine, veterinary medicine, environmental health, public health, and the social sciences is evident, in order to prevent and mitigate future health crises caused by novel infectious diseases as well as provide well-being of people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.…”

Breaking barriers: The landscape of human and veterinary medical anatomy education and the potential for collaboration

“…IPE activities that include VET students are incredibly important as the need for collaboration between HUM and VET professionals increases with the rise of complex bioethical issues (Magalhães‐Sant'Ana, 2016), as evidenced by debate over the proposed rat–human embryo experiments (Cyranoski, 2019) and zoonotic diseases (Wilkes et al, 2019), exemplified by the COVID‐19 pandemic. Calls for medical education to incorporate IPE into curricula are only increasing (Dykstra and Baitchman, 2021). Very few schools engage both VET and HUM students in these activities (Courtenay et al, 2014; Dykstra and Baitchman, 2021), and this lack of collaboration is potentially due, in part, to the aforementioned disconnect between these programs.…”

“…Calls for medical education to incorporate IPE into curricula are only increasing(Dykstra and Baitchman, 2021). Very few schools engage both VET and HUM students in these activities(Courtenay et al, 2014;Dykstra and Baitchman, 2021), and this lack of collaboration is potentially due, in part, to the aforementioned disconnect between these programs. Helping educators at both types of institutions understand their shared goals, curricula, and pedagogies as outlined in this study can only facilitate more IPE activities, including incorporating IPE in the context of anatomy education(Pawlina and Drake, 2015).Given the similarities in curricula found, other specific examples of where collaboration between VET and HUM programs could occur in curricular matters include collaboration regarding differences between the overall training of the two types of medical professionals.…”

Why and how a university in Rwanda is training its medical students in one health

“…Training in One Health at all biomedical and medical higher learning institutions would enable the world to be better prepared for, and responsive to, emerging health threats, such as future pandemics and the adverse effects of climate change on population health outcomes, including infant mortality and life expectancy 8 . The power of the One Health approach in biomedical practice is indisputable and its success lies in the implementation of quality interdisciplinary education that will shape the attitude and practice of future health leaders 9 .…”