One Health Economics in Cape Town!
The 8th World One Health Congress took place in September 2024 in Cape Town, South Africa, organized by the Global One Health Commission, with support from the quadripartite collaboration on One Health (FAO, WHO, UNEP, WOAH). The event gathered around 1,400 participants from across the globe.
It’s encouraging to note that, for the first time, one of the 70 parallel sessions of this biennial conference was exclusively dedicated to the Economics of One Health. Although I have not yet accessed the full content of these contributions, the session’s titles and other related publications by the same authors suggest a growing trend to evaluate the benefits of the One Health approach using economic tools:
- Enhancing the Evidence Base on the Added Value of Investing in One Health (Barbara Haesler, FAO, UK)
- Cross-Sectoral Modelling to Determine the Societal Impacts of Farm-Level Interventions Against Antimicrobial Resistance (Eve Emes, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK)
- Sustainable Financing for Health Security Threats through a Cost-Benefit Analysis of One Health Interventions in Cameroon (Elisabeth Dibongue, National One Health Platform, Cameroon)
These applied studies echo the call to optimize cross-sectoral efforts and justify an integrated solution based on economic criteria, as we advocated in our agenda paper. One contribution takes this cost-benefit approach further by assessing the efficiency of investing in pathogen genomics (The Case for Investing in Pathogen Genomics, Shurendar Selva Kumar, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore). The intuition is that genomics can enhance early detection and prevent cross-species transmission, reducing economic losses during zoonotic outbreaks.
The issue of food safety, another area where One Health strategies can bring substantial added value, was addressed through the lens of consumer behavior (Consumer Responses to Food Safety Risk Information, Mike Murphy, International Food Policy Research Institute, United States).
Finally, the diversity of study terrains was highlighted by the presentation of the World Bank’s One Health strategy for the Middle East and North Africa region (The Economic Perspective: Introducing the World Bank’s One Health Regional Initiative for the MENA, Takeaki Sato, World Bank Group, United States).
In the next posts, I’ll try to review some of these works or connected studies by the authors who took part in this session.

8th World One Health Congress Logo
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Marc Leandri (23 octobre 2024). One Health Economics in Cape Town! One Health Economics (OHE). Consulté le 9 juillet 2025 à l’adresse https://1healthecon.hypotheses.org/433
Recent comments