The Untapped Power of One Health at the Local Level in the United States

Global challenges to our rapidly changing ecosystems urgently demand integrated approaches to improve human, other animal, and environmental health. Although One Health holds promise at local levels, One Health initiatives have mainly been implemented at global and national levels. This paper aims to (1) assess a representative sample of peer-reviewed and newspaper articles in the United States (U.S.) for One Health coverage and (2) highlight locally based cases that exemplify One Health approaches. We conducted a systematic search of peer-reviewed literature and local newspaper reports for articles published from January 2010 to May 2024 for references to human, other animal, and environmental health domains and community engagement and developed a rubric to score returned articles for relevant terms. We also describe three case examples of local One Health applications known to the authors from personal and professional experience. (1) The peer-reviewed literature returned no ar9cles about local One Health. A separate descriptive analysis was performed on newspaper articles. Out of a sample of 350 of the 2634 newspaper articles returned, 37 did not meet inclusion criteria, and only 8 (2.6%) articles met our One Health criteria. (2) All three cases qualified as One Health initiatives but were not named as such. Local newspaper coverage of health issues in the U.S. is largely confined to one and sometimes two of the three domains. Given the many local decisions that are made about land use, environmental health, disaster planning, conservation, and disease prevention and control, this may represent missed opportunities for decision-makers to achieve shared health goals.