- At the One Health India Conference, 2019, the government has announced its plan to launch One Health India Initiative.
- The initiative calls for an intersectoral approach to tackle the most urgent health threats such as Brucellosis, Tuberculosis, Anthrax, and Antimicrobial Resistance in India and across the globe.
- The initiative seeks to deal with human and animal health together in interaction with the environment in an integrated manner. Under this initiative multiple regulatory bodies, such as the department of biotechnology and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) will collaborate to launch a “compulsory” national immunisation programme for livestock. This would help address vaccine preventable diseases given that zoonotic diseases are major public health issue in India. Zoonotic means infectious diseases that are spread between animals and human.
- It would also help address the growing use of antibiotics as growth promoters in animals. Use of antibiotics in food animals has been a major cause for spread of antimicrobial resistance. Antimicrobial resistance occurs when microbes (bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites) become resistant to antimicrobial drugs
