Integrative One Health and biosecurity: A unified vision for a resilient future

One Health and biosecurity both seek to safeguard the well-being of ecosystems, the public and animals from biohazardous materials. However, these two fields remain distinct across different fields of research and policy. One Health is vital in the context of global proliferation, where the association of animals, populations, and commodities facilitates the spread of zoonotic diseases, including COVID-19, Zika, and Ebola, underscoring the necessity of integrated health policy and management. One Health is described as “an interwoven, coherent strategy that intends to optimize and stabilize the well-being of animals, people, and ecosystems” sustainably. This association was established in 2007 with the intention of bringing human and veterinary well-being closer together, as the split between doctors and veterinarians was seen as a barrier to addressing emerging or re-emerging human diseases that originate in animals.

Launched in 2014, the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) is an organization that intends to reinforce the worldwide effort to identify, respond to, and prevent communicable diseases. Even though the GHSA aims to advance One Health, it places heavy emphasis on high-impact vaccination campaigns and reducing antibiotic resistance, with less attention to the socioeconomic and environmental drivers of human health.^[1] Hence, One health has yet to completely integrate a sustainability perspective, particularly biological invasions, into its plan of action. One Biosecurity is necessary to address a number of the most important environmental and sociological challenges, such as changing climatic conditions, intensive farming, rapid urbanization, human global relocation, insufficient technical expertise, and public resistance to vaccines and pesticides.^[2] It supports an overarching framework to address various biosecurity threats that exceeds the established limits of environmental, plant, human, and animal health. One Biosecurity offers an especially important multidimensional conceptualization that connects the fields of plant, animal, human, and ecosystem health care, thereby strengthening the link between One Health and biosecurity [Figure 1]. However, biosecurity lacks effective involvement of the health and social sciences, further weakening the partnership.^[3]

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Figure 1: Integrative One Health and biosecurity.

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One Biosecurity will need the involvement of social scientists, chemists, modelers, engineers, economists, population biologists, and taxonomists in a refreshed plan shaped by public perceptions, legislation, and politics.^[4] There are several instances of an unknown species influencing multiple sectors, including human health and environmental sustainability.^[5-8]

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been growing global awareness of the importance of biosecurity in protecting public health, particularly the need to better manage the risks associated with the introduction of unwanted organisms across international borders. This has led the countries to evaluate their national biosecurity systems to learn lessons from the pandemic. The term biosecurity initially emerged as a means to protect the agricultural sector from the risks posed by pathogens and pests, but it has since been defined in numerous ways. Efficient biosecurity policies are crucial to address numerous key environmental and sociological challenges facing humankind, such as global catastrophic biological risks, threats to global food security, resource depletion, and resistance to vaccines and pesticides.^[9]

Yet biosecurity is a topic of varying interpretations that involve dealing with risks from food handling, bioterrorism, laboratory biosafety to prevent the escape of harmful organisms, agricultural production systems to stop disease entry, and the hazards posed by introduced organisms to humans, flora, and fauna.^[10] Even though the present idea of biosecurity has arisen comparatively recently, it has gained growing traction at national, subnational, and intergovernmental levels as an integrated approach that could address some of the existing inadequacies in the management of alien species invasions. For instance, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has emphasized biosecurity as a valuable, collaborative, multidisciplinary, and multisectoral approach to controlling and preventing the introduction of exotic species.

One Health and biosecurity are intended to protect and support life by managing complex, integrated health, environmental, and agricultural challenges through interdisciplinary approaches. Both involve input from various disciplines, such as agriculture, social science, public health, biology, data science, and environmental science, to develop efficient approaches. Significant efforts have been invested in considering what this might look like for one health.^[11] The three pillars of biosecurity, including animal, human, and environment, are shared by the One Health concept, and biosecurity should be executed with One Health in mind, particularly when it comes to cooperation and collaboration among sectors in order to regulate the spread of harmful microbes. For instance, veterinarians, locally and producer groups can provide advice on issues of consequence to local health departments. Local veterinary and human medical associations could meet more often to discuss topics of mutual interest in their communities. Nationally and internationally, the stakeholders in one health could catalyze the perception to trickle down to the public, local producers, and clinicians.^[12]

Challenges such as changing climatic conditions, antimicrobial resistance, and food safety further highlight the interrelationships among animals, humans, and environmental well-being. The schemes, like reduce the need for antimicrobials on farms for sustainable agrifood systems transformation (RENOFARM) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), promote One Health by supporting regenerative agriculture approaches and education, improving biosecurity, public-private sectors, decreasing antimicrobial utilization, and nurturing collaboration among farmers and global organizations.^[13]

The agrarian society comprises an astonishing 608 million farms worldwide, and their livelihoods rely heavily on animal husbandry. To address this problem, an interdisciplinary One Health approach that focuses on unified surveillance and engagement across animals, humans, and the environment is important. Deeply rooted in old medical traditions and refreshed by new threats, including antimicrobial resistance and zoonotic disease outbreaks, this underscores the necessity of One Health for a comprehensive solution. The principles of preventive measures and surveillance are essential to this strategy, which ensures the early recognition and mitigation of health threats before they escalate into a worldwide emergency.^[14]

The water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) plan of action can significantly reduce the risk of exposure to superbugs or drug-resistant bacteria by inhibiting the spread of pathogens between animals and humans. Further measures to reduce the risk of extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) infections include biosecurity and the implementation of vaccination plans. Biosecurity and WaSH actions must be integrated to build on the success of the One Health program.^[15] Biosecurity was developed not only for awareness and safety against bioterrorism, but also to assess the interdependence of all aspects of global protection and security, including research on biosecurity, pandemic threats, the consequences of global warming, the current rise in natural disasters, and agricultural biosecurity. Worldwide health biosecurity is achievable through efficient partnerships among collaborators at all levels, which require strong associations that expand the conceptual boundaries of region, community, state, or country.^[16] Even though there is no ultimate level of biosecurity that can eradicate all threats to human well-being, the present restrictions in global health biosecurity can be reduced through meaningful learning and effective collaboration in emergency planning, emergency management, and the development of security measures.^[17]

Successful partnership, management, and resourcing are crucial to coordinating the actions of various collaborators across the biological safety spectrum to achieve One Health. The necessity of holistic governance has been recognized as an essential element for addressing both bio invasion.^[18] Diverse government ministries or departments responsible for the environment, human and agricultural affairs frequently operate under separate legislation, and consequently, policy actions, research investments, and data collection are chaotically organized or shared. Such circumstances result in incremental measures, redundant work, wasted resources, and yet a wicked policy aftermath.^[19] To be effective, the policies of biosecurity need to take advantage of an additional understandable, global perspective that seeks collaboration among the agriculture, environment, and health sectors at local, national, and global levels, and should plan to move the established core on controlling individual organisms and regions to guarantee certainty in the total risk assessment framework.^[20]

The claim that biosecurity is previously vital to One Health is simply refuted by numerous lines of evidence demonstrating its limited application to laboratory biosafety, farm sanitation, and zoonotic disease control. Conversely, a One Biosecurity will not only guarantee that it clearly includes the role biological invasions play in plant, human, animal, and ecosystem health, but also influence accessible biosecurity lawmaking and authoritarian instruments at national and global scales to deliver better community health benefits.^[21] It will also help in the cleaner execution plan across the biosecurity range. This involves utilizing open science infrastructure to predict overseas hazards, supervising the global pathways of commodities and people through preliminary inspections and observation of their subsequent post-border itineraries, and further collaborative efforts to connect with psychological sociologists to assist in understanding the steps needed to better fulfill biosecurity regulations.^[22]

The integrative One Health and biosecurity provide a preventive, protective, and sustainable framework for addressing current and future biological hazards. Aligning policies and bridging disciplines with science permits societies to move from emergency response to long-term health safety. To sustain the accelerating global push for One Health, there needs to be solid evidence that the perception helps deliver superior well-being outcomes and is not just a rebranding of business-as-usual actions. One Biosecurity may be the change of heart desired to convey this promise.