National One Health Mission

One Health is an integrating idea that brings different sectors together to solve the health, productivity, and conservation challenges and has major implications for India. India with its diverse wildlife, one of the largest livestock populations and high density of human population, and diversity of flora, creates opportunities for harmonious coexistence or conflicts such as heightened risks for inter-compartmental spread of diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic, recent outbreak of Lumpy Skin Disease in cattle, and the constant threat of Avian Influenza show that it is not just about addressing diseases from human health point of view (zoonosis) but there is also a need to address the livestock, wildlife and environmental aspects, including plants. This also opens opportunity for leveraging the complementarities and strengths that is inherent in each sector and devises integrated, robust and agile response systems. The complexity and interconnectedness of the challenges threatening humans, animals, and environment including plants, where they coexist, therefore requires a holistic and integrated ‘One Health’ based approach to achieve the goal of ‘Health and Wellness for All’.

VISION

‘To build an integrated disease control and pandemic preparedness system in India by bringing human, animal and environmental sectors together for better health outcomes, improved productivity and conservation of biodiversity.’

Goals, Outcomes and Strategies of One Health

The key goals of the One Health Mission will be towards enabling and achieving the stated vision, making the mission responsive to the needs of the human-animal-environment interface, establishing a broad based inclusive collaboration for achieving the nation’s health goals, and reducing the existing disease burden. To achieve these goals, the One Health Mission also aspires to implement the following strategies, which are ongoing and will be strengthened under the mission along with several other new activities:

Major components of the One Health Mission

1. Capacity building, collaboration, communication and storage of potential high- risk pathogens
2. Creation of a national network of existing and upcoming high-risk pathogens laboratories (BSL-3/4) labs across departments and keeping them functional through continuous R&D and use during outbreak response
3. Developing and assessing the feasibility of various tools (AI tools, NGS, diagnostic algorithms for detection/discovery of emerging novel pathogens in humans, animals and environment and establish metagenomic pipelines for novel pathogen discovery.
4. Develop protocols, tools and framework for integrated disease surveillance at the animal-human-environment interface for emerging diseases.
5. Plug and play vaccine platforms, diagnostics, capacity for development of high quality therapeutic monoclonal.
6. Develop analytic capability to derive better insights from the data and information of human, livestock and wildlife sectors