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Paper short abstract:

This paper uses the case of influenza to argue that critical approaches to zoonoses must be grounded in multispecies perspectives that integrate environmental, animal, biomedical and veterinary historiographies and tackle zoonoses as ecological, human-animal, and global health problems.

Paper long abstract:

Recognition that COVID-19 is caused by a virus that spilled-over from a non-human animal cast a sharp spotlight on the enormous challenges posed by “zoonoses”. A zoonotic event of this kind has been anticipated for decades while approaches have been rooted in developments in framing zoonoses as ecological and global health problems over the last seventy-five years. This paper uses the case of influenza to trace the changing ways in which zoonoses have been tackled as problems connected to human interactions with pathogens and animals, with changing environments, and with each other through transnational systems of animal food production and consumption. It highlights efforts to build partnerships across species to monitor and manage influenza in human and non-human animals, but also the daunting biological, economic, cultural, and geopolitical challenges that zoonoses present. The paper details how such partnerships have coalesced into ‘One Health’ frameworks and explores the assumptions of such frameworks, the agendas they serve, and their implications for human, animal, and planetary health. The takeaway message is that effective approaches to understanding and controlling zoonoses need to be grounded in multispecies perspectives of their complex bio-social ecologies, which integrate environmental, animal, biomedical, and veterinary historiographies, and anthropologies of zoonoses. Such perspectives can illuminate the ways in which zoonoses have been shaped by the changing scale and impact of human relations with pathogens, animals, and their environments, and by inequalities in the distribution of ‘one health’ resources within and between countries.