NEED OF ONE HEALTH TO COMBAT CHALLENGES OF ZOONOTIC DISEASE

NEED OF ONE HEALTH TO COMBAT CHALLENGES OF ZOONOTIC DISEASE

Sanjiv Kumar* and Puja kumari Bhagat¹

* Associate Professor, Department of Veterinary Pathology, Bihar Veterinary College, Patna

¹M.V.Sc. Scholar, Department of Veterinary Pathology, Bihar Veterinary College, Patna

Human populations are growing and expanding, as a result, more people live in close contact with wild and domestic animals, both livestock and pets. Close contact with animals and their environments provides more opportunities for diseases to pass between animals and people. The movement of people, animals, and animal products has increased from international travel and trade. As a result, diseases can spread quickly across borders and around the globe. Moreover, climate variability may also expand the current limits of agricultural activities, increasing the chance of contact between species that have not normally interacted in that area. Livestock excretes many microorganisms which have zoonotic potential. These pathogens can be transmitted by water and food and the risk of transmission to humans is increased if food crops are watered with contaminated water.

Zoonotic diseases are a major public health concern in several countries of the world and India is among the top geographical hotspots for such diseases. Zoonoses are diseases and infections that are transmitted between animals and humans. Emerging and re-emerging zoonotic diseases are increasingly recognized as a serious challenge with potentially serious human health and economic impacts. Almost 75% of newly emerging infectious diseases are of zoonotic origin, with climatic shifts and anthropogenic land use changes implicated as major drivers of this emergence. Moreover, out of every ten infectious diseases that are identified in humans, six are zoonotic in nature. Altogether, the impact of zoonoses on public health systems globally can be far-reaching. They profoundly affect human well-being, occupations, animals, and environments. With ever-increasing human intrusion into natural ecosystems, the growing demand for animal-based food products, international trade, international travel, and other factors, human exposure to zoonotic diseases has never been higher. It is estimated that zoonoses are attributable to more than 2.4 billion cases of illness and 2 million human deaths every year globally.

Increasing numbers and severity of infectious disease outbreaks over the last two decades, such as Nipah virus infection, Zika virus infection, Kyasanur Forest Disease, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) in India, and diseases like Ebola and COVID-19 globally had profound impacts on human health, caused severe burdens on human livelihoods and economies, and posed global security threats. In India, major public health zoonotic diseases are rabies, brucellosis, toxoplasmosis, cysticercosis, echinococcosis, Japanese Encephalitis, plague, leptospirosis, scrub typhus, and KFD. Since this country is also home to a variety of vectors, susceptible hosts, and a conducive environment, it naturally faces a potential threat from various vector-borne zoonotic diseases. As per the IDSP database, zoonotic infections like Japanese Encephalitis have emerged from Tamil Nadu to Uttar Pradesh, leptospirosis from Maharashtra to Punjab, Cutaneous Leishmaniasis from Delhi to Rajasthan to Jammu and Kashmir, KFD from Karnataka to Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Goa, Nipah virus from West Bengal to Kerala, scrub typhus from Arunachal Pradesh to Tamil Nadu to name a few.

There has been a major upsurge in the cases of Japanese Encephalitis, a mosquito-borne infection, in many states of India in the last decade. It is quite likely that climate change will further extend the range of the mosquitoes to temperate zones such as Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and other northern states. Other mosquito-borne diseases that have been reported in India include zoonotic simian malaria (which emerged in the union territory of the Andaman and Nicobar islands) and West Nile fever, which has spread into new regions as the virus has been introduced into competent vector habitats, possibly as a consequence of climate changes.

Climate change might affect other diseases endemic to India. Some of these diseases may exhibit changes in transmission intensity or shifts in their geographical ranges due to the impact of climate on the relevant vector populations. For Tick-borne diseases, temperature accelerates the development cycle, egg production, population density, and distribution of ticks. For example, the distribution of the bacterial spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme borreliosis, may extend into the Himalayan region as climate change causes a shift to milder temperatures. The disease is transmitted to humans during blood feeding by hard ticks of the genus Ixodes. Seropositivity to B. burgdorferi suggests infection by the organism and the presence of Lyme disease in these areas. Talking in the current scenario, scrub typhus has been endemic in India for several decades, but in recent years, it has been increasingly reported and has become a significant health concern. In recent years, the development of agriculture in India has led to an important transformation of the ecological landscape, creating suitable habitats for different vectors such as malaria vectors and scrub typhus vectors. Heavy rains, high temperatures, and natural disasters, e.g. floods, earthquake and cyclones lead to a rise in zoonotic diseases due to increased contact of humans with wild and domestic mammalian reservoirs, or changes in behavior, and reservoir density of infected animals. For instance, diseases such as anthrax increase in warm weather while leptospirosis increases in the rainy season. The bubonic and pneumonic plague is transmitted from wild rats to domestic rats and then to people. Thus, ecological disruptions could cause both temporal and spatial shifts in temperature, precipitation, and humidity that could affect the ecology of vectors, consequently increasing the risk of pathogen transmission to humans and livestock. Therefore, vector control also requires a multi-disciplinary, multi-sectoral collaboration for it to be successful in this regard. For example, in the case of malaria, as the health sector fights adult mosquitoes, the agriculture sector and other associated sectors can fight mosquito larvae through biological control or other sets of practices.

Hence every state needs to identify zoonotic diseases prevalent in the state and related climatic conditions which can affect the incidence of these diseases and subsequently develop a specific “One Health’’ action plan for addressing them.

The annual report 2020-21 of the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying indicates separate reporting on ‘one health’ and Zoonosis. This concept has been reported to be and visaged to understand the risk for human and animal health including both domestic animals and wildlife and the environment as a whole. For this purpose, the department in collaboration with the National Academy of Veterinary Sciences organized a national webinar on AMR – mitigation for food safety under the theme of health on 30 October 2020. Reported items under this title of one health and Zoonosis are: 

1. Avian influenza: preparedness, control, and containment;
2. National action plan for control and containment of glanders in equines;

iii. National action plan for control and containment of African swine fever in pigs;

1. Guidelines and advisory on lumpy skin disease;
2. Training/workshop on AMR;
3. Eradication of canine rabies;

vii. Role in disaster/crisis management in cooperation with NDMA;

viii. Department initiative during a covid-19 lockdown and after;

1. National animal disease control program for FMD and brucellosis; x. Disease-free status of the country.

Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Government of India also runs schemes under livestock health and disease control aimed to improve the animal health sector by way of implementation of

1. Prophylactic vaccination programs against various diseases of livestock and poultry,
2. Capacity building,

• Disease surveillance and

1. Strengthening of veterinary infrastructure.

All the schemes under this program have been fine-tuned considering one health and Zoonoses aspects of animal diseases, by giving weightage to control of zoonotic diseases, emergent or re emergent diseases, surveillance of exotic diseases, etc. Under the scheme objectives covered are:

1. To implement a critical animal disease control program to eradicate PPR by 2030 through vaccination of all sheep and goats as well as to control classical swine fever (CSF) by vaccinating the entire pig population,
2. To provide veterinary services at the farmers’ doorstep through mobile veterinary units (MVUS) and
3. To assist states in controlling animal disease, preventing and controlling important livestock and poultry diseases prevalent in different states as per the priorities of respective states.

The One Health concept thus, clearly focusses on consequences, responses, and actions at the animal–human–ecosystems interfaces, and especially emerging and endemic zoonoses, the latter being responsible for a much greater burden of disease in the developing world.

References

1. Sharun, Khan, et al. “SARS-CoV-2 infection in farmed minks, associated zoonotic concerns, and importance of the One Health approach during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.” Veterinary Quarterly1 (2021): 50-60.

2. Garcia, S.N.; Osburn, B.I.; Cullor, J.S. A one health perspective on dairy production and dairy food safety. One Health2019, 7, 100086.

3. Gruetzmacher, K., Karesh, W. B., Amuasi, J. H., Arshad, A., Farlow, A., Gabrysch, S., … & Walzer, C. (2021). The Berlin principles on one health–Bridging global health and conservation. Science of the Total Environment, 764, 142919.

4. https://www.woah.org/en/what-we-do/global-initiatives/one-health

5. https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/index.html

6. 22nd Indian Veterinary Congress, XXIX Annual Conference of IAAVR & National Symposium on Advancements in Veterinary Medical Research contributing to “One Health” for Betterment of Animal and public Health and their welfare. 8-9 April, 2022.

7. El Zowalaty, Mohamed E., and Josef D. Järhult. “From SARS to COVID-19: A previously unknown SARS-related coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) of pandemic potential infecting humans–Call for a One Health approach.” One health9 (2020): 100124.

8. World Health Organization. Joint Risk Assessment Operational Tool (JRA OT): An Operational Tool of the Tripartite Zoonoses Guide–Taking a Multisectoral, One Health Approach: A Tripartite Guide to Addressing Zoonotic Diseases in Countries. Food & Agriculture Org., 2020.

email:mrsanvet@rediffmail.com

ONE HEALTH APPROACH: THE NEED OF THE HOUR

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