One Health and Culling as a Public Health Measure

Public Health Ethics 9 (1):5-23 (2016)
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Abstract

One of most pertinent and acute risks that the world is now facing is emerging or re-emerging zoonotic diseases. This article focuses on culling as a measure for zoonotic disease control, specifically the culling of 11,000 badgers as part of the Randomized Badger Culling Trial in the UK and the culling exercises in Singapore. The independent expert panel that devised the UK study concluded that reactive culling was ineffective in reducing the cases of bovine tuberculosis in cattle. The panel also concluded that proactive culling was not cost-effective. Behind the scarcity of empirical evidence to support culling, the resultant reduction in biodiversity can actually harm both animals and humans. Public health policies should be evidence-based, culturally adaptable and ethically justified; a novel biomedical and public health approach, named One Health, plausibly provides a reasonable ethical framework as well as research and interventional methods that square with that framework. OH recognizes that nonhuman animals and humans are interlinked in both sickness and health, since we all share the same ecosystem. OH could potentially replace standard public health strategies, as it provides alternative evidence-based methods for biomedical research and adds a non-anthropocentric component to an ethical decision-making process

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References found in this work

Animal Liberation.Bill Puka & Peter Singer - 1977 - Philosophical Review 86 (4):557.
One Health, Vaccines and Ebola: The Opportunities for Shared Benefits.Benjamin Capps & Zohar Lederman - 2015 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28 (6):1011-1032.
Ebola Needs One Bioethics.Paul B. Thompson & Monica List - 2015 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 18 (1):96-102.
One Health and paradigms of public biobanking.Benjamin Capps & Zohar Lederman - 2015 - Journal of Medical Ethics 41 (3):258-262.

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