SIU One Health

As human populations continue to grow and expand into new landscapes, climate change alters historic temperature and precipitation patterns and natural habitats become increasingly fragmented. These changes have strengthened the connections among human, animal, and environmental health, making their interactions more complex.

Warmer temperatures have allowed wildlife populations and pathogens to expand across North America (Larreur et al. 2025).
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Habitat loss and fragmentation have displaced wild animals into novel landscapes increasing interactions with other wildlife, humans, and domestic animals.
This increased interaction leads to increased likelihood of pathogen transmission.
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According to the World Health Organization, approximately 60% of human infectious diseases and approximately 75% of emerging infectious diseases originate from pathogens of wild or domestic animals. The development of approaches to mitigate these impacts requires nontraditional partners to create multidisciplinary teams with varied expertise.

One Health is a concept recognizing humans, animals, and the environment are intrinsically linked, thus maintaining the health of one requires maintaining the health of all.
One Health provides an umbrella platform for diverse individuals and organizations to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate on the development of approaches needed to mitigate the increased human health risk associated with our changing world.

While the concept was introduced more than a century ago, the term “One Health” was introduced in 2003 and developed into an international initiative in 2006. It became more prominent in the higher levels of the United States Government in 2017 when it was defined as

“One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach — working at the local, regional, national, and global levels — with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.” (U.S. Government Definition, established 2017)

Because resources provided by traditional federal and state agencies to address human, animal or environmental health are typically limited to projects that directly align to the agencies specific mission, few traditional resources are available to address issues that require transdisciplinary collaborations. Pursuing information regarding human disease, animal disease, and environmental health separately leads to an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms allowing disease transmission and outbreaks.

“SIU One Health” is a collaboration between the Center for Wildlife Sustainability Research; the College of Agriculture, Life, and Physical Sciences; and School of Medicine to use the One Health conceptual model to facilitate the development of multidisciplinary research projects under the One Health initiative. SIU One Health recognizes that humans, animals, and the environment are intrinsically linked, thus maintaining the health of one requires maintaining the health of all.
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SIU One Health provides a platform for disciplines at SIUC with discernably different interests to collaborate on multidisciplinary approaches of enhancing local, regional, national, and global health.

Our goal is to develop a better understanding of the links between humans, animals and the environment to reduce the spread of pathogens and enhance well-being across all species.