The dawn of Structural One Health: A new science tracking disease emergence along circuits of capital

Robert G. Wallace, Luke Bergmann, Richard Kock, Marius Gilbert, Lenny Hogerwerf, Rodrick Wallace and Mollie Holmberg

Social Science & Medicine, 2015, vol. 129, issue C, 68-77

Abstract: The One Health approach integrates health investigations across the tree of life, including, but not limited to, wildlife, livestock, crops, and humans. It redresses an epistemological alienation at the heart of much modern population health, which has long segregated studies by species. Up to this point, however, One Health research has also omitted addressing fundamental structural causes underlying collapsing health ecologies. In this critical review we unpack the relationship between One Health science and its political economy, particularly the conceptual and methodological trajectories by which it fails to incorporate social determinants of epizootic spillover. We also introduce a Structural One Health that addresses the research gap. The new science, open to incorporating developments across the social sciences, addresses foundational processes underlying multispecies health, including the place-specific deep-time histories, cultural infrastructure, and economic geographies driving disease emergence. We introduce an ongoing project on avian influenza to illustrate Structural One Health's scope and ambition. For the first time researchers are quantifying the relationships among transnational circuits of capital, associated shifts in agroecological landscapes, and the genetic evolution and spatial spread of a xenospecific pathogen.

Keywords: One Health; Neoliberalism; Economic geography; Circuits of capital; Niche analysis; Avian influenza (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.09.047

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