One Health in the Genomic Era: Connecting Human, Animal and Environmental Genomics

Abstract

 Pathogens do not read borders. They do not distinguish between a bat roost, a livestock market, an irrigation channel, and a hospital ward. For much of modern medicine we drew those lines anyway—one set of institutions for human health, another for animal health, and a third for the environment. The COVID-19 pandemic made the cost of that fragmentation impossible to ignore, and the genomic era now offers the tools to dismantle it. In this editorial, we argue that the hospital in the low- and middle-income country (LMIC) must be recognized as the connective node of a One Health surveillance architecture and that this architecture must now extend beyond pathogens to the chemical and plastic pollutants that increasingly shape infectious disease risk.