Invest in animal health to prevent the next pandemic
Investing in animal health and welfare, and the systems which underpin them is not an easy case to make when global security seems to hang delicately in the balance and closer to home, an ongoing cost of living crisis, economic stagnation and deeply fractured health service foreground media attention and policy making. We are living in a complex world riddled with complex problems which play out at the macro and the micro.
But I would argue that given that global and domestic challenges are already multiple we should not add another devastating global emergency into the mix; averting another pandemic is possible.
To do this we firstly have to recognise that human health does not operate in a separate field of existence. We are interconnected to the health of animals and the wider environmental and ecosystem health which supports us both.
We can see this interconnectivity born out in the extensive line of zoonotic diseases (infectious diseases which have jumped from animals to humans) which have quite literally plagued humanity with fatal and far-reaching consequences. In recent times we have seen the brutal effects of Covid19, Ebola and SARs. And yet a legacy of historic neglect when it comes to pandemic prevention, short termism in policy making and pandemic fatigue seems to have stymied progress on addressing the root causes and drivers.
Given that more than 75% of infectious diseases originate in animals, animal health and the systems which support it would be the logical starting point for any preventative pandemic policy making; global or domestic. And yet, animal health is consistently neglected in policy making, chronically underfunded and under resourced at the grassroots where it is needed most and notably absent in the wider public discourse on global health and pandemics.
The mpox public health emergency is a striking sign that the rate of change is simply too slow.
The Pandemic Accord which was first concepted during Covid19 is a potential international agreement under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic preparedness, prevention and response, offers a promising step in the right direction. But it is worrying that the most divisive point of negotiation has been focused on pandemic prevention and One Health; One Health is the integrated approach to public health which aims to recognise that human, animal and ecosystem health are tightly bound and interrelated. Understandably, there are very real concerns about the financing of animal health and health systems, and this is especially relevant in low- and middle-income countries who are already struggling to support human health.
This is why it is so important for high-income countries to continue to offer resources and funding for programmes which take a truly preventative One Health approach to pandemic prevention.
The World Bank’s Pandemic Fund assists low- and middle-income countries in pandemic prevention and crucially, recognises and finances activities related to One Health. Contributing towards replenishment rounds for pandemic prevention in low- and middle-income countries should be an obvious choice for policy makers concerned with avoiding a damaging global catastrophe. And yet, investment from high income countries is often forthcoming only after or during the event.
But short-sighted isolationism will only incur greater costs that go far beyond the economic further down the line.
And if we remember that pandemic prevention costs far less than dealing with an actual pandemic, we can view it as an investment rather than a cost and an investment which yields cascading benefits for sustainable development and global security in general.
It is time to reconceptualise human health, move beyond unhelpful siloes and invest accordingly in animal health to truly prevent the next pandemic.
Esme Wheeler is a Global Affairs Advisor at Brooke, an international charity that protects horses, donkeys and mules and supports people in the developing world to work their way out of poverty.
