“One health”: under this abstruse name hides a concept better known by its Anglo-Saxon terminology, “One Health”. He is interested in the close links between human health, the health of wildlife and that of ecosystems. Its main motive: to protect us from zoonoses, these infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans – or vice versa. And thus protect us from the risk of a pandemic.
Veterinarians, ecologists and ethologists, virologists, bacteriologists, infectiologists, epidemiologists and doctors… are thus invited to collaborate to retrace the twists and turns that viruses, bacteria and other pathogens take, in nature or in farms, before infecting our species. Detect the spread of these infectious germs in their animal reservoirs. Identify their possible passage to our species. Determine risky human behaviors. Finally, identify the best weapons to deploy, in the field, to counter these microbial offensives. The approach varies little, but must be repeated in each ecosystem.
It is a matter of monitoring in order to anticipate, in short. And, in the event of high circulation of a pathogen in an animal population, “To intervene before it is transmitted to humans and then spreads, where appropriate, through human-to-human contamination”, emphasizes Sylvain Baize, from the Institut Pasteur-CIRI. However, the concept conceals a share of ambivalence: by striving to prevent a risk, do researchers not risk, on the contrary, in certain cases, favoring it?
The threat of “Disease X”
The main challenge is to ward off a sneaky threat: “disease X”. Clearly, a hypothetical disease due to an unknown virus (or bacteria), likely to cause a serious pandemic. In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) added this “disease X” to the list of pathologies that could endanger humanity. Disturbing prophecy: two years later, the Covid-19 knocked on the doors of the whole world. Ironically, this pandemic is a perfect model of “disease X”. “Covid-19 is most likely a zoonosis due to the introduction of a coronavirus from an animal reservoir”, recalled the French scientific council in its opinion of February 8, devoted to the “One Health” concept.
Since this health crisis, the concept has seduced the political sphere. Brandished like an incantation, the formula is supposed to green certain programs. For more than twenty years, however, far from the politico-media hype, researchers have been pursuing their hunt for microbes in the great bestiary of nature. So many stones in the building of the dam that they are thus striving to erect against a new pandemic surge. In 2015, the magazine One Health was even created by the publisher Elsevier.
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