One Health: EcoHealth 2016: Welcome from the President of the International Association for Ecology and Health

Excerpt

It is with great pleasure and highest esteem and appreciation for the organizing teams that the International Association for Ecology and Health welcomes you to One Health–EcoHealth 2016 in Melbourne, Australia from December 3–7. This congress brings together for the first time the global One Health and EcoHealth communities. One Health and EcoHealth both aim for more integrated approaches to the health of humans and animals while considering the integrity of their surrounding social-ecological systems. This represents a counter current to the main stream of rather “reductionist” biomedical science, which continues to specialize and fragment. It is obvious that science progresses in ways that cannot be foreseen, in the same way that evolutionary lineages respond to a changing environment. On the other hand, we have evidence that a specialist perspective can become inadequate for solving complex problems like feeding our world safely and sustainably, responding to emerging diseases and invasive species, or addressing climate change and antimicrobial resistance. …