One Health is an established concept; defined by the World Health Organisation as an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimise the health of people, animals, and ecosystems. In Scotland, where food production, agriculture, wildlife and natural ecosystems play a vital role in both our society and our economy, understanding the interconnectedness between people, animals, plants and the environment is particularly important. A One Health approach supports this by promoting collaboration between the public health, veterinary, environmental and food sectors, and the integration of surveillance, research and policy across these disciplines to strengthen our understanding of disease transmission, and our ability to navigate any regulatory and operational barriers to intervention. In doing so, One Health delivers a coordinated, systems-based approach that supports better public health outcomes, enables us to identify emerging threats and helps us respond to complex challenges such as antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and the health impacts of a changing climate.
In line with One Health principles, FSS's own foodborne illness reduction strategy focuses on the key transmission pathways for pathogens that are responsible for the greatest burden of foodborne disease in Scotland. By moving beyond pathogen-specific measures towards a more integrated, pathway-based approach, our strategy prioritises enhanced surveillance and cross-sector intelligence to deliver evidence-based interventions that are most likely to achieve meaningful benefits to public health.
FSS works collaboratively with partners across the human, animal, food, and environmental health sectors to deliver our strategy and advance the wider implementation of a One Health approach in Scotland. We do this in a number of ways, including:
- Supporting Public Health Scotland (PHS) in implementing their Public Health Microbiology Strategy for Scotland; working with partners to promote fit for purpose laboratory services for food, water and environment that support the integration of Pathogen Genomic Sequencing into surveillance, outbreak response and national epidemic preparedness;
- Contributing to government strategy for tackling AMR; including the provision of data to the Scottish One Health Antimicrobial Use and Antimicrobial Resistance (SONAAR) report, which reports trends on antimicrobial use and AMR in Scotland;
- Commissioning research and surveillance to generate the epidemiological insights and genomic data that help us to understand the burden of foodborne illness and attribute the main sources of infection.
A key output from our One Health programme has been Smart Pathogen Profiling; a pilot project which was commissioned through the Food Standards Agency’s PATHSAFE programme. PATH-SAFE was a four-year, UK-wide, cross-government programme which piloted the development of a national pathogen surveillance network for improving the detection, tracking and understanding of foodborne pathogens utilising the latest genomic sequencing technologies and environmental sampling methods.