Gaps in Health Security Related to Wildlife and Environment Affecting Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness

Improved health security is crucial for global and national health systems to counter infectious disease epidemics and their wide-scale socioeconomic consequences. The importance of a One Health multisectoral and collaborative approach – one that recognizes the connection between the health of humans, animals and ecosystems – has been acknowledged for years following introduction of the term in the early 2000s. Although significant advancements in multisectoral coordination have been made over the past decade, the overwhelming focus has been on human and domestic animal health; scant attention has been paid to the risks and impacts of zoonotic diseases at wildlife–human or wildlife–livestock interfaces, or to the role of changing environmental conditions. The consequences of this neglect have been costly and deadly with thousands of known zoonotic disease outbreaks in recent decades linked to wildlife...