Veterinarians and physicians: Working together for one medicine

The AMA and the American Veterinary Medical Assn. are collaborating on the One Health Initiative as human and animal medicine join forces to fight existing and emerging zoonotic diseases.

Editorial. Aug. 13, 2007.

About 60% of all human pathogens are zoonotic, transmissible between animals and people. Even more striking, approximately 75% of recently emerging infectious diseases affecting humans are of animal origin.

These Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics underscore just how important a new partnership being forged between the worlds of human and animal medicine is to public health. The American Medical Association and American Veterinary Medical Assn. are taking the lead.

Last September, Roger Mahr, DVM, newly elected as AVMA president, announced his intent to launch an effort to unite human and veterinary medicine to improve animal and public health. Then in June, the AMA voted at its Annual Meeting to increase collaboration with the veterinary community to better recognize, monitor and treat zoonotic diseases, and more broadly collaborate in medical education and biomedical research. Just a month later, AMA President Ronald M. Davis, MD, offered his support to Dr. Mahr's project, dubbed the One Health Initiative.

The One Health concept is not new. Dr. Mahr pointed out in a 2006 address that physician Sir William Osler, founder of the modern medical teaching concept, wrote in the 1800s that "veterinary medicine and human medicine complement each other and should be considered as one medicine." In the 1960s, veterinary epidemiologist Calvin Schwabe, DVM, MPH, ScD, took up the cause using the phrase "one medicine." But the concept didn't catch on in either medical community, despite the prevalence of diseases shared by humans and animals.