One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022 – 2026) – UNEP
Recently One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) has been launched. It aims to tackle the health hazards faced by humans, animals, plants and the environment.
The scheme has been launched by the following four organizations:
- Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO),
- United Nations Environment Program (UNEP),
- World Health Organization (WHO), and
- World Animal Health Organization (WOAH)
One Health promotes a sustainable and healthy future through the United Nations Environment Program through collaboration, communication, coordination and capacity building. Its goal is to create a framework for integrating capabilities and systems. This will help to better prevent, anticipate, detect and take necessary steps to collectively prevent health hazards.
The plan is built on six interrelated actions. These actions collectively contribute to achieving sustainable health and food systems.
These six actions include the following:
- Enhance One Health capabilities to strengthen health systems;
- reducing the risk of zoonotic diseases turning into epidemic and pandemic;
- Control and eradication of zoonotic epidemics, neglected tropical and carrier-borne diseases;
- strengthen the assessment, management and communication of food safety risks;
- Curbing Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), which is slowly becoming a global pandemic, and integrating the environment into One Health.
- One Health is an integrated and coordinated approach. It aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of humans, animals, plants and ecosystems.
Key challenges before One Health:
- The emergence of new infectious diseases,
- The burden of endemic zoonotic and carrier-borne diseases is increasing,
- There is an increasing threat to food and water conservation around the world.
Source – The Hindu
