“History tells us that this will not be the last pandemic, and epidemics are a fact of life.” These words are those of the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, spoken on the first International Epidemic Preparedness Day, on December 27.
Words that can close the year 2020 as well as open 2021, as health is expected to occupy the first place of our concerns in the coming months. Far from being just a commonplace at the start of the year, wishing yourself good health takes on its full meaning. And invites us to question ourselves about our ability to build the conditions for our collective health, which implies reconciling human health and the health of ecosystems, making them only one health. Thus, 2021 could well become the year of One Health.
Above all, a crisis of the living
For the past year, the world has been going through an exceptional health crisis, characterized by the contamination of more than 80 million people and the death of 1.7 million of them at the end of 2020, to which must be added the victims intercurrent illnesses, including psychological conditions caused by confinement.
The social consequences of this crisis are catastrophic: shutdown of entire sections of our economy, restrictions on the free movement of populations, unemployment, bankruptcies … And despite the production, in record time, of vaccines whose collective protection capacities remain to be measured , this situation of health crisis and socio-economic slowdown is likely to continue for several more months. A crisis caused by the emergence and then the global spread of a pathogenic agent hitherto unknown, the origin of which is probably animal.
In short, our societies have been idling for several months because of a zoonosis that appeared in Asia which then spread very quickly to the surface of our planet. A family of diseases, transmissible from animals to humans, called to multiply due to the pressures exerted by humanity on the environment, as highlighted by the Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) in a recent analysis.
Rethinking our health in the light of the health of ecosystems
This crisis thus underlines the vulnerability of our societies in the face of a major “natural” hazard. This crisis is certainly major in terms of its magnitude, its gravity and the speed of its spread around the world, but it is by no means exceptional.
An increasing number of infectious diseases have been recorded across the planet since the early 1980s, with two to three new infectious agents emerging per year. Among these emerging diseases, 75% of them are zoonoses, i.e. transmissible from animals to humans.
Thus, recent history has seen a proliferation of health crises which should invite us to rethink our systems of prevention and management of health risks, sometimes fundamentally. Because many of these health risks had been the subject of alerts, such as the need to develop systemic health approaches, to anticipate the emergence and prevent the spread of pathogens, by mobilizing the One Health concept. In short, integrate the interactions between human health, animal health and ecosystem health in all public health systems.
Moving away from siled health approaches, favoring prevention over treatment, so many options to promote immediately to preserve our future. Otherwise, our health system would be doomed to evolve only under the effect of crises, most often brutal and uncontrollable. Without doubt the most important wish to make at the start of the year.
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