Adding a One Health approach to a research framework for minority health and health disparities

Abstract

The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) has developed a framework to guide and orient research into health disparities and minority health. The framework depicts different domains of influence (such as biological and behavioral) and different levels of influence (such as individual and interpersonal). Here, influenced by the “One Health” approach, we propose adding two new levels of influence – interspecies and planetary – to this framework to reflect the interconnected nature of human, animal, and environmental health. Extending the framework in this way will help researchers to create new avenues of inquiry and encourage multidisciplinary collaborations. We then use the One Health approach to discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated health disparities, and show how the expanded framework can be applied to research into health disparities related to antimicrobial resistance and obesity.

Re-Imagining Public Health Education: Students’ Perspectives and Considerations

“…Although One Health is well established (Ruckert et al, 2020), it is only taught in certain public health courses, such as epidemiology and environmental health (Linder et al, 2020), and need to consider the implications of structural racism. While these are appropriate spaces for dedicated One Health training, an adapted curriculum with One Health and environmental racial justice can be designed to reach students across disciplines, especially program tracks that rarely require exposure to these concepts to have the fundamentals to health equity framing (Morgan et al, 2022), thus underscoring the need for structural One Health and biosecurity training across sectors to approach such challenges through holistic and cross-disciplinary actions that start addressing these mutually reinforcing pathways of health inequity.…”