About this Research Topic

Background

Recognizing that the human and animal health are interconnected brings along the challenge of integrating their respective health systems, including routine disease surveillance activities, outbreak management, and emergency preparedness. However, approaches in these different sectors are still unaligned in many ways, including their respective agendas, both at the country and the supranational levels. Several initiates have been launched to study and tackle this problem. Since the early 2000s, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the World Organization of Animal Health (OIE) paved the road of multi-sectorial One Health approaches and collaborations, leading to the recent publication of the Tripartite Zoonoses Guide. In Europe, the “One Health European Joint Programme” aims at fostering the transdisciplinary cooperation of activities that are relevant to One Health within and across European countries. Furthermore, various scientific networks and consortia have been set up to bring together professionals and experiences from different sectors.

Integration is key to the One Health agenda, and to the challenge of future preparedness and response to foodborne pathogens and other emerging threats, both from an epidemiological and microbiological perspective. This Research Topic aims at describing first-hand, successful, inspirational (and possibly visionary), experiences about the integration of approaches, procedures and methodologies for One Health surveillance across the human health, animal health, environmental health, and food safety sectors, at the local, national, or supranational levels.

Within the overarching domain of One Health surveillance, this Research Topic welcomes experiences of integration in the domains of routine surveillance, outbreak management and preparedness, especially those based on active inter-sectorial collaborations, with the broadest range of stakeholders, both public and private. This Research Topic has a focus on – but is not limited to:

• The design, implementation and evaluation of integrated surveillance programs;

• Laboratory methods, reference materials and data;

• Data and specimen sharing;

• Interpretation of surveillance data, communication, and response, within and across sectors;

• Integrative experiences from the prevention and control of hazards of cross-sectorial relevance (including Campylobacter, Salmonella, Listeria, pathogenic E. coli and cross-pathotypes in E. coli, among others) and emerging threats (including the challenge of antimicrobial resistance).

Furthermore, research assessing One Health capacities and capabilities, designing integrated surveillance systems and their evaluation, fits the scope of this Research Topic, including the introduction of innovative tools.

The primary geographic focus is on the European context, from the regional, national and peripheral levels, encouraging cross-country and cross-sector collaborations both from quantitative and qualitative sciences.

Keywords: One Health, One Health Surveillance, Cross-disciplinary, Multi-sectorial, Foodborne pathogens, Emerging threats, Harmonization, Capability, Capacity, Interoperability, Adaptability, Proficiency testing, Genomic, Databases, Repositories

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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