Paper Short Abstract:

While climate change and new human-animal-environment assemblages increase the chance that tick-borne animal and human diseases continue to escalate globally, One Health theory struggles to produce practical, feasible and sustainable solutions to contain this risk.

Paper Abstract:

With 900 species, excellent physical resilience, the ability to thrive in a vast range of environments, the biting preference for the most inaccessible body parts and rather nonselective feeding behaviour, ticks are second – so far (and cases are already underreported) – only to mosquitoes in the number of disease cases they cause in the human population worldwide. Epidemiological data on tick-borne diseases (TBDs) in the animal population is uncertain, because of the poor knowledge of several of these TBDs, frequent co-infection, and mild and vague symptoms in other-than-human beings. Yet TBDs like babesiosis in Africa’s bovines and winter tick parasitism in North America’s moose are already a cause of high veterinary concern, while others often emerge in unsuspected new locations (like Rocky Mountain spotted fever in dogs in Mexico) or are detected for the first time in their traditional hosts (like tick-borne encephalitis in deer in Italy). Meanwhile, ticks are on the move due to climate change (moving up mountains and parallels) and animal movements, spreading TBD risk into new areas and animal and human bodies. Control currently relies on prevention through increased risk awareness and protective behaviours, but if this is hardly working in humans, how can it work in domestic and, even more, wild animals? In this scenario of high human-animal-environment interdependency, One Health strategies are ideal in theory, but the (still largely unknown) complexity of this relationship hampers the identification of the most feasible and sustainable ways to prevent TBDs from continuing to escalate globally.