One Health: Pandemic preparedness, prevention, and response

The intro module consists of two lessons, where the first lesson aims to give a short description of the history and journey of One Health as a framework and the notion of human-animal-environmental health interconnection that it is built upon. The second lesson is an introduction to "creeping crisis", a concept to explain crisis that evolve over time and demands new toolboxes to tackle. After completing the module, participants should have an overview of One Health’s history as well as a deeper understanding of One Health, and the importance in exploring and understanding actual and forthcoming issues that can be found at the human-animal-environmental interface and manifest a creeping crisis.

The second module consists of four lessons where the general aim is to explore One Health’s current status and identify ways of moving forward to strengthen the concept’s impact on pandemic preparedness and prevention. This by highlighting the gaps, obstacles, and imbalances that exist within the framework, especially regarding the three sectors of human, animal, and environmental health. The first and second lessons present One Health from a legal perspective and explains how the legal system could be more aligned to One Health in order to safeguard human, animal and environmental health. The third lecture continues where the two previous lessons took off and further explores anthropocentrism and a particular blind spot within One Health: human-animal relations, whereas lesson four focuses on the relation between the health of nature and One Health in the context of pandemic risk and mitigation.

In the previous modules, you learned more about the struggle to define "One Health". Due to the complexity of the concept, a correct conceptualization of One Health can enhance its implementation. But how can we translate theory to practice? Policymakers need evidence to inform policy, and scientists play a key role in the process. In this module, you will access resources that reverberate the literature debate around the science-policy nexus. Finally, the module is preparatory for the following ones, which will bring to your attention some case studies where the One Health approach was put into practice and implemented. For this purpose, in this module, you will read more about the operationalization of One Health.

As your familiarity with the conceptualization of One Health and the process to operationalize it has grown, the fourth and the fifth module will provide you with some case studies. Lecturers will discuss successes and challenges in implementing One Health, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic context. This module will zoom into each of the pillars of One Health: human health and food safety, animal health, and environmental health.