Jean, COVID-19 is a classic example that this is a critical time to act to contribute to sustainable development goals and ensure a brighter future for generations to come. How do you personally understand One Health?

The lives of humans and animals are interconnected in deep and complex ways; one of the connections is the fact that over two thirds of the emerging human infectious diseases are zoonotic (so passed from animals to people). The COVID-19 pandemic painfully reminded us that a collaborative and transdisciplinary health approach between veterinarians, physicians but also environmentalists as well as governments, the private sector, and associations and institutions is more urgent than ever.

The One Health approach is not new, but the concept evolved as we humans have realized since the end of the 19th century the contribution of animals to the development of civilizations: spiritual, economic, environmental, and emotional importance to name but a few.

How can we operationalize One Health?

Operationalizing One Health requires a transversal view on the problems we are facing. There is no such thing as national borders for a virus or even bacteria. In addition to transversality, we need to develop early detection and diagnostic capabilities on the ground, thus the question of proximity is of utmost importance in order to rapidly pick up early detection signals. This also requires collaboration because whether it is in the private sector or even in the public one, no company or organization can alone embed all capabilities along the continuum of care we need to address. Together, we also need to develop economic models which will provide sustainable solutions adapted to each country's particular situation.

Let me add that the role of civil society is critical. Making More Health is our 10-year partnership with the well-known NGO Ashoka which aims at developing social entrepreneurship within the health sector around the world. We are now supporting over 200 of these individuals who build a positive eco-system around them for the good of everyone. With Ashoka we also create start-up platforms (for example in Nairobi, Kenya) to accelerate social entrepreneurs in health. One of the successful projects is CowTribe, a successful last mile enterprise which delivers veterinarian service to rural areas in Ghana and other countries. Over the past three years, more than 34,000 smallholder farmers were supplied with affordable and quality medical treatments through CowTribe.

What does Boehringer Ingelheim do already in the area of zoonotic diseases?

What comes to mind first is our cooperation with ZAPI, a European consortium around the research on countermeasures and processes used in animal health that could potentially be applicable to COVID-19 and similar emerging diseases. This is innovation and collaboration at its best seeking synergies between human and animal health. A prime example of a collaborative effort set up between physicians, veterinarians, biologists, ecologists and public health institutions.

Another example is Foot & Mouth Disease (FMD). We put much focus on enabling control of animal diseases that affect global food security. Beyond the economic impact of an FMD outbreak, there is an enormous human cost to farmers and their local communities as well as to local food security. We manage 17 national and regional FMD vaccine banks insuring countries against such outbreaks and their consequences. Therefore, we work with the respective national disease control authorities to model and plan optimal vaccination programs in the event of an outbreak. We are also investing 230m euro in a biosafety level-3 production site in France manufacturing FMD vaccine.

I also have to mention rabies. Since the sixties of the last century, we have been a partner to institutions, health authorities and veterinarians for the control of rabies. Globally, we have the largest footprint within the industry for rabies control both in pets and in wildlife with nearly 100 million vaccine doses administered annually. An example of One Health in action here is a project in Pakistan where stray dogs are first vaccinated against rabies, and then marked with a collar that identifies them as safe.

One Health sounds like a big mission…

Yes, it is and our company is in a very particular situation to contribute to the debate with its R&D platforms in both human and animal health.

There is much work to do and I feel the energy of my colleagues to tackle these issues with the public sector, associations and institutions. No one has the solution alone in this field. We need to seriously consider the One Health approach in order to prevent the next pandemic and not only predict it will come.

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The World Health Summit panel discussion on One Health and its operationalization can be viewed under this link.