A zoonosis is any disease or infection that is naturally transmissible from vertebrate animals to humans. Animals thus play an essential role in maintaining zoonotic infections in nature. Zoonoses may be bacterial, viral, or parasitic, or may involve unconventional agents. As well as being a public health problem, many of the major zoonotic diseases prevent the efficient production of food of animal origin and create obstacles to international trade in animal products.

Monday 6th July 2020 marks World Zoonoses Day 2020. This year, the 150 partners in the One Health Poultry Hub will observe a two-minute silence of private reflection on those who are known, and those who remain unknown, who are suffering from endemic and emergent zoonotic diseases. These diseases, such as Covid-19 and Ebola, affect millions of communities around the world every year. The two-minute silence will take place at noon local time.This year’s World Zoonoses Day comes amidst the defining global health crisis of our time. In the context of the global pandemic, the world’s attention has been focused around one infectious zoonotic diseases. While major recent zoonotic modern disease outbreak, such as Covid-19 or Ebola, and cause major world disruption, much of the work the One World Poultry Hub and other One Health research projects explore concerns diseases that go under the news radar but are still devastating, those such as salmonella and other foodborne diseases. The reasons these diseases remain little talked about are complex – not least that how they are transmitted and approaches to managing them are often hard to fit into traditional media narratives- Institute of Development studies

Zoonoses are disease which can be transmitted from aniamls to humans. In fact, 2 out of every 3 infectious disease in people originated within animals.

This is why protecting animal health is so vital. Preventing and managing disease in animals ultimately safeguards the health of people!