One Health Concept Applied to Zoonoses and Infectious Diseases Transmitted by Arthropods

Abstract

According to the World Health Organization, the concept of One Health emerged to translate the interrelationships between human, animal, and environmental health. With increasing urbanization and globalization, and, consequently, with the decrease in the distance between people and the environment and wildlife, the association between human and animal health has become a relevant topic for the control of infectious diseases. Many of these diseases are transmitted by arthropod vectors and are linked to disturbances caused by anthropogenic actions (1,2). Environmental changes can interfere directly in the physiology of both the pathogen and its hosts, and indirectly, resulting from the interaction between different species, promoting the emergence of new diseases and increasing the pathogenicity of the existing diseases. Environmental chemical pollution contributes to changes in the abundance of different species and can result in immunosuppression, which favours susceptibility to pathogens (2). Often, the alterations of the original habitat force pathogens into new ecological niches or facilitate their establishment and transmission, as found in the history of malaria and emerging diseases in the riverside areas of the Madeira River in the Amazon region (3). Climate change can affect and modulate the epidemics of pathogenic agents by providing conditions for the proliferation of the arthropod vectors of infectious diseases and altering the proliferation of pathogenic agents disseminated by water (4). For example, the increase in average temperature and the occurrence of extreme events associated with global climate change contribute to the increase in the incidence of arboviruses common in the tropics and the northern hemisphere, as in the episode of autochthonous cases of dengue fever in France between 2013 and 2015 (https://ecdc. europa.eu/sites/portal/files/documents/dengue-annualepidemiological-report-2016.pdf). In developing countries such as those in Latin America, International Journal of