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Coronavirus China
ChinaScience

Covid-19 drives ‘prevention over cure’ strategy; hinges on global cooperation

  • When looking at how to halt future epidemics, the One Health strategy monitors changes in land use, ecological pressure and human population expansion
  • ‘Covid taught us that what happens in a small part of the world is everybody’s problem,’ says One Health High-level Expert Panel co-chair

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The One Health approach recognises that human-linked climate change, as well as food production and lifestyle patterns, may be factors driving viruses to spill over from animals to humans. Photo: AFP
Eduardo Baptista
The Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus is credited with coming up with the term “prevention is better than cure” in the 1500s, but it took a devastating pandemic 500 years later for governments to seriously look at that approach on a global scale.
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Last week, the number of Covid-19 infections reported to the World Health Organization topped 200 million. While massive resources and energy have been poured into fighting the disease with vaccines, the WHO is tackling the question of how to prevent it happening again.
The focus of those efforts is summed up in the strategy known as One Health, or a recognition that all human activities and habits have consequences in the one ecological system shared by life on Earth and need to be considered in public health policies.

With most diseases stemming from animal origins, human population expansion and deforestation, for example, can create more opportunities for wildlife-borne diseases to infect humans. The added challenge for the One Health approach is a need for international cooperation in a world fractured by political division and suspicion.

One Health was the main theme of the May summit of the World Health Assembly, in which member-states of the WHO make decisions to improve public health. For the first time, the assembly stressed the need for all countries to adopt the One Health approach.

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“One Health has always been around, but there wasn’t really an urgency to implement it,” said Wanda Markotter, director of the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Viral Zoonoses, in South Africa. She was named co-chair of the One Health High-level Expert Panel in May.

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