Global and regional governance of One Health and implications for global health security.

The apparent failure of global health security to prevent or prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for closer cooperation between human, animal (domestic and wildlife), and environmental health sectors. However, the many institutions, processes, regulatory frameworks, and legal instruments with direct and indirect roles in the global governance of One Health have led to a fragmented, global, multilateral health security architecture. We explore four challenges: first, the sectoral, professional, and institutional silos and tensions existing between human, animal, and environmental health; second, the challenge that the international legal system, state sovereignty, and existing legal instruments pose for the governance of One Health; third, the power dynamics and asymmetry in power between countries represented in multilateral institutions and their impact on priority setting; and finally, the current financing mechanisms that predominantly focus on response to crises, and the chronic underinvestment for epidemic and emergency prevention, mitigation, and preparedness activities. We illustrate the global and regional dimensions to these four challenges and how they relate to national needs and priorities through three case studies on compulsory licensing, the governance of water resources in the Lake Chad Basin, and the desert locust infestation in east Africa. Finally, we propose 12 recommendations for the global community to address these challenges. Despite its broad and holistic agenda, One Health continues to be dominated by human and domestic animal health experts. Substantial efforts should be made to address the social-ecological drivers of health emergencies including outbreaks of emerging, re-emerging, and endemic infectious diseases. These drivers include climate change, biodiversity loss, and land-use change, and therefore require effective and enforceable legislation, investment, capacity building, and integration of other sectors and professionals beyond health.

Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its control measures on women and children: A Zimbabwe case study.

COVID-19 presented countries with unprecedented health policy challenges. For low-income countries in particular, policymakers had to contend with both the direct threats posed by COVID-19 as well as the social, educational, and economic harms associated with lockdown and other infection prevention and control measures. We present a holistic and contextualised case study of the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19 on women and children, with some assessment of their uneven distribution across socio-economic, age and gender groups. We used different types of primary and secondary data from multiple sources to produce a holistic descriptive analysis. Primary data included: qualitative data obtained from 28 in-depth interviews of key informants, six focus group discussions; and 40 household interviews. We also extracted data from government reports and announcements, the District Health Information Software version 2 (DHIS2), newspaper articles and social media, as well as from published research articles. Our findings show that the direct and indirect adverse impacts of COVID-19 were compounded by many years of severe political economic challenges, and consequent deterioration of the healthcare system. The indirect effects of the pandemic had the most severe impacts on the poorest segment of society and widened age and gender inequalities. The pandemic and its accompanying infection prevention and control measures negatively affected health service delivery and uptake. The management of COVID-19 presented enormous challenges to policymakers and public health specialists. These included managing the greatest tension between direct and indirect harms; short-term and long-term effects; and the unequal distribution of harms across different segments of society.

The evaluation of five serological assays in determining seroconversion to peste des petits ruminants virus in typical and atypical hosts.

Peste des petits ruminants (PPR) is an infectious viral disease, primarily of small ruminants such as sheep and goats, but is also known to infect a wide range of wild and domestic Artiodactyls including African buffalo, gazelle, saiga and camels. The livestock-wildlife interface, where free-ranging animals can interact with captive flocks, is the subject of scrutiny as its role in the maintenance and spread of PPR virus (PPRV) is poorly understood. As seroconversion to PPRV indicates previous infection and/or vaccination, the availability of validated serological tools for use in both typical (sheep and goat) and atypical species is essential to support future disease surveillance and control strategies. The virus neutralisation test (VNT) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) have been validated using sera from typical host species. Still, the performance of these assays in detecting antibodies from atypical species remains unclear. We examined a large panel of sera (n = 793) from a range of species from multiple countries (sourced 2015-2022) using three tests: VNT, ID VET N-ELISA and AU-PANVAC H-ELISA. A sub-panel (n = 30) was also distributed to two laboratories and tested using the luciferase immunoprecipitation system (LIPS) and a pseudotyped virus neutralisation assay (PVNA). We demonstrate a 75.0-88.0% agreement of positive results for detecting PPRV antibodies in sera from typical species between the VNT and commercial ELISAs, however this decreased to 44.4-62.3% in sera from atypical species, with an inter-species variation. The LIPS and PVNA strongly correlate with the VNT and ELISAs for typical species but vary when testing sera from atypical species.