January, 2020, the South China Morning Post reported an outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza in Hunan Province, which is geographically adjacent to Hubei Province. Since 2003, tens of millions of birds have died from avian influenza, and hundreds of millions have been slaughtered. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that, since 2003, avian influenza has infected less than 1000 people worldwide, killing about half of them.
It should not come as a shock that within weeks, economic anxiety, rather than pandemic death, rose to the top of the headlines. In each area – agriculture, disease control, economic policy – application of good normal science had resulted in improved yields, low disease rates and increased profits.
Responses to these epidemic diseases were targeted on surveillance, containment, vaccine development and the like. These responses are all appropriate as emergency measures based on the best practices of normal science. But what of long-term agriculture, health and economic policies?
For those thinking in terms of PNS, the concurrent emergence of COVID-19, ASV, avian influenza and global economic uncertainty is no surprise. But few have addressed the underlying social-ecological conditions which would be useful for developing linked economic, public health and agricultural policies. Similarly, few have researched those questions in relation to suggestions that entomophagy or veganism could be one-size-fits-all solutions to climate crises, hunger and sustainable development (Waltner-Toews, 2017).
What are the larger implications of choosing certain health-related outcomes such as disease control or food production over others such as local community autonomy and resilience, and equitable and sustainable distribution of both production and consumption? Do shifts towards eating insects, less meat or more almonds result in more resilient social-ecological systems? It is in the context of these larger questions that ecohealth and its theoretical (complexity) and philosophical (PNS) bases are most relevant, and where One Health will ultimately demonstrate its worth.
Notes
1 The Ecohealth Training Manual developed by the South-east Asia Ecohealth Field Building Initiative contains practical elaborations of many of the ideas in this chapter (available at: https://www.vetswithoutborders.ca/library/fbli (accessed 3 June 2020)).
2 This characterization of a complex situation is founded on a tradition of systems thinking and complexity science. It also corresponds well to Alfred North Whitehead’s ‘process philosophy’ – see for example Whitehead (1978) and Barbour (1997).
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