One Health

Where does the term come from?

The idea is old, the term is new. Already in the 19th century, Rudolf Virchow argued that there was no sharp dividing line between human and veterinary medicine, and coined the word zoonosis. The currently authoritative definition comes from the One Health High-Level Expert Panel and was adopted on 1 December 2021 by the four organisations of the so-called Quadripartite: the Food and Agriculture Organization FAO, the World Organisation for Animal Health WOAH, the Environment Programme UNEP, and the World Health Organization WHO. According to this, One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimise the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems. In 2022, the One Health Joint Plan of Action for the years 2022 to 2026 followed.

Why does this affect veterinary medicine so directly?

A significant proportion of human infectious diseases have an animal origin. Veterinarians therefore stand at the interface: with zoonoses such as rabies, brucellosis, or salmonellosis, in monitoring antibiotic resistance, along the food chain, and in animal health law. The ante-mortem and post-mortem inspection is also essentially applied One Health, just in administrative form.

What does this mean for students and graduates from EU countries?

One Health is not a legal term and not a separate examination subject of the Veterinary Examination; the content is distributed across disease control, food science, parasitology, and meat hygiene. Those who study in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, or the Baltic states will often find the term in module descriptions and electives, because it is firmly embedded in European research funding. For recognition of the qualification in Germany it carries no weight: what matters there is solely whether the training certificate meets the requirements of § 4 of the Federal Veterinary Surgeons Act and Article 38 of Directive 2005/36/EC. As a profile topic for doctoral studies, job applications, or a path into the public veterinary service, it remains useful nonetheless.

Common misconceptions

One Health is not a programme managed by a single authority, and not an additional qualification that can be acquired. It describes a way of working across professional and departmental boundaries, which in Germany is distributed across many jurisdictions: public health offices, veterinary offices, environmental authorities, the Robert Koch Institute, and the Friedrich-Loeffler Institute. This is exactly where things often get stuck in practice, because data and reporting channels are maintained separately.