The challenge of assessing the added value of One Health initiatives
Yesterday, on November 3rd, “One Health Day”” was celebrated worldwide through both in-person and virtual events, organized by the Global One Health Community, the One Health Initiative, and the One Health Commission.
Fourteen years after the FAO, WOAH (former OIE), and WHO launched their tripartite alliance to “address health risks at the human-animal-ecosystems interfaces” (FAO, 2010), the One Health concept has clearly emerged as an inspiring driver for institutional collaboration and is gaining momentum in the media and public opinion. After all, it’s hard to oppose an approach whose benefits—through integrated action and interdisciplinary research for public human health—are so apparent. To put it bluntly, opposing the general concept of One Health would be like opposing peace, justice, or sustainability. But to prevent One Health from becoming an empty shell like sustainable development in its time, we still need much more tangible implementations of the approach and more robust estimations of its actual added value.
Indeed, rigorously demonstrating the added value of investment in One Health solutions is necessary to reorient resources toward innovative intersectoral collaboration for the detection, prevention, and regulation of zoonoses, antimicrobial resistance, and other emerging health threats. One Health Economics should contribute to this assessment, keeping in mind that if it is carried out rigorously, we might find that a One Health approach is not warranted in some cases. Such instances would likely be very rare but still need to be acknowledged to give One Health more scientific and policy credibility beyond its unifying political message.
Evaluating this added value is tricky, as it requires comparing a cross-sectoral initiative with a counterfactual single-sector response. So far, few studies have actually undertaken this exercise, as shown by the insightful literature review conducted by Auplish and her co-authors (Auplish et al., 2024), published this spring in the One Health journal. Their systematic review identified 97 studies explicitly assessing the costs and benefits (in terms of net present value or DALYs) of One Health initiatives.
While 80% of them reported a positive economic added value (potentially reflecting publication bias), only 32% had actually compared the initiative in question with a sectoral counterfactual. For instance, in the case of canine rabies, a study used scenarios to compare a response that included integrated human post-exposure prophylaxis, mass dog vaccination, and One Health communication with human prophylaxis alone. This highlights the authors’ call for a standardized and consistent methodology for the economic valuation of One Health interventions, as it would encourage broader endorsement of this approach. They also call for improvements in the valuation of non-monetary benefits related to “social and environmental” protection, which echoes our proposal to develop a One Health Burden (Leandri & Dalmas, 2024), broader than the traditional health economics burden.
By differentiating the studies along the six “action tracks” outlined by the One Health Joint Plan of Action, they also find that most reports with positive economic returns focus on endemic zoonotic diseases (action track 3). However, evidence of the added value of One Health integration (communication, collaboration, coordination, and capacity building—the “4Cs”) is often limited. For certain action tracks, like tackling antimicrobial resistance (action track 5), robust economic evidence is still lacking, often due to limited data.
In the next post, we will contrast this call for quantitative evaluation with an approach based on political economy and focused on the implementation of One Health initiatives in the South.

Auplish, A., Raj, E., Booijink, Y., de Balogh, K., Peyre, M., Taylor, K., … & Häsler, B. (2024). Current evidence of the economic value of One Health initiatives: A systematic literature review. One Health, 100755.
FAO. (2010). The FAO-OIE-WHO collaboration, A tripartite concept note.
Leandri, M., & Dalmas, L. (2024). One Health Economics: why and how economics should take on the interdisciplinary challenges of a promising public health paradigm. Frontiers in Public Health, 12, 1379176.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Marc Leandri (4 novembre 2024). The challenge of assessing the added value of One Health initiatives. One Health Economics (OHE). Consulté le 9 juillet 2025 à l’adresse https://1healthecon.hypotheses.org/453
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