One Medicine- One Health: Implementing the Vision in Real-World Public Health

In the past year, three major health care organizations – the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Medical Association and the Society for Tropical Veterinary Medicine – have officially endorsed the concept of “One Health” recognizing the continuum of communicable infectious disease from humans to animals and animals to humans. Further, there is widespread recognition that continuous robust surveillance of animals is beneficial not only to animal health but to food safety for humans and for early warning of naturally-occurring novel diseases (all of significance have been zoonotic for the past 20 years in the US and elsewhere) and for detecting bioterrorism events (with only one exception, all human bioterrorism agents are animal diseases.)