Geneva Health Forum 2024

Animal health and wellbeing as part of the healthy human environment

Not scheduled

15m

Geneva

Oral presentation Health and the environment, time for solutions

Description

1 Introduction – Objectives:

COVID-19 and climate change have highlighted the importance for humans of a healthy environment, confirmed as a human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment by the San Salvador Protocol and the United Nations. This has prompted the recognition for collaboration between health disciplines in research and practice.

This talk will review the function of animal health within a clean, healthy and sustainable human environment, to inform how we can conceptualise and integrate human, animal and environmental health.

2 Methodology:

1) Conceptual analysis of whether “healthy environment” and “animal health” can be defined by the translational application of the WHO definition of health that incorporates physical, mental and social wellbeing.
2) Review of the literature in relation to associations between human environmental health risk factors and animal health and wellbeing (inclusion criteria include both positive and negative factors).
3) Consideration of different models for reconceptualising health across humans, animals and the environment.

3 Results and Discussions:

1) Animals’ bodies have physical health. Animals, as sentient beings, can have mental health in terms of motivation, affect, mood, and overall balance. Many animals exhibit social behaviours, particularly gregarious and live-parenting species. The WHO concept of health is applicable to animals.

2) Poor animal health can inhibit ecosystem services including carbon sequestration (mediated by reduced abundance, diversity and altered behaviour), and increase animal-animal pathogen transmission and animal-human spillover (mediated by animal infections, reduced diversity, immunological naivety, stress, shedding and interactions with other animals and humans). Concentrated animal stocking densities, feeding regimes and waste can be associated with pathogen spillover to multiplier populations of domestic animals, land use change, the utilisation of human edible resources (in particular fish, wheat and soya for omnivorous terrestrial and carnivorous aquatic species), nitrogenous pollution associated with eutrophication, and increased methanogenesis and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Positive impacts of animals on human wellbeing can be mediated by human interactions with natural and anthropogenic environments; purposive compassionate behaviour such as caregiving; and interpersonal relationships between individual humans and animals. These generally (but not always) require positive animal health and wellbeing, to minisise caregiver mental and social health compromises such as bereavement and compassion fatigue.

3) Animals can be integrated into physical, mental and social aspects of human wellbeing within three models: (A) Mutual analogical inspiration, in which different species’ health are considered to be comparable to one another; (B) Intraspecific population health, in which different subpopulations’ health are interlinked as risk factors and indicators; (C) shared values, in which human, animal and environmental health are seen as aspects of a collective and aligned set of health-related and compassionate motivations.

4 Conclusions:
Humans’ clean, healthy and sustainable environment requires healthy animals, across physical, mental and social wellbeing. This recognition can inform and motivate collaboration across health disciplines.