One Health is an emerging concept that aims to bring together human,
animal, and environmental health. Achieving harmonized approaches for
disease detection and prevention is difficult because traditional
boundaries of medical and veterinary practice must be crossed. In the
19th and early 20th centuries this was not the case--then researchers
like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch and physicians like William Osler and
Rudolph Virchow crossed the boundaries between animal and human health.
More recently Calvin Schwabe revised the concept of One Medicine. This
was critical for the advancement of the field of epidemiology,
especially as applied to zoonotic diseases. The future of One Health is
at a crossroads with a need to more clearly define its boundaries and
demonstrate its benefits. Interestingly the greatest acceptance of One
Health is seen in the developing world where it is having significant
impacts on control of infectious diseases.