One planet, one health, one future: The environmental perspective
Vincenzo Naddeo
Abstract
The final goal of the “One Health” is the control of the global health of our planet with a multidisciplinary approach that involves knowledge for different disciplines. In the near future, we could see in the same team veterinarians, doctors, and environmental experts work together to guarantee the health of our planet and one sustainable future for all. The planet Earth stands out in the known Universe for its wealth of water, biodiversity, and living species, including humans. Water is majorly relevant to all living beings; in some organisms, up to 90% of their body weight comes from water. Up to 60% of the human adult body is water. In the same way, our planet is covered up to 70% by water. With its natural and anthropic cycles, water is an essential element in our planet, and any alteration in terms of its quantity and/or quality can affect the health of all interconnected elements and living species. The water resource is not the sole element crucial for the health of people, animals, and the natural ecosystems; all environmental resources are interconnected and participate in the health of living species and ecosystems. These aspects are generally approached by civil and environmental engineering or, more in general, by environmental scholars. If from one side it is reasonably verified that we live under one planet and the interconnections between the different elements are generally known; however, the environmental engineering science and the health matters of humans and animals are fundamentally not well integrated, which is of concern at present days. “One Health” is an integrated approach between three main spheres of knowledge (Figure 1): human health, animals' health, and living environments or environmental health (Ash, 2019; Zinsstag et al., 2018). The latter component is often neglected, as evident from the various sources where it is not mentioned strongly (Essack, 2018). As it is known, environmental issues seem to be a significant index towards accomplishing UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The 17 SDGs illustrate how to develop a sustainable and healthy environment for all living beings (Brito, 2012; Griggs et al., 2013), all highly interconnected with the “One Health” approach. One Health is not a new approach, but it is more recently put into action by FAO and WHO because globalization and relative movement of people, animals, and natural products have exponentially increased from international travel and trade. As a result, diseases can spread quickly across borders around the globe, and the most evident indicator of this issue is the current COVID19 pandemic. Various common One Health issues can be noticed, including zoonotic diseases, antimicrobial resistance, food safety and security, vector-borne diseases that come from insect bites, ticks and tick-borne diseases, environmental contamination, and other health threats shared by people, animals, and the environment (Dantas-Torres et al. 2012; Kahn et al., 2008; McEwen & Collignon, 2018). Among them, zoonotic diseases, also defined as zoonoses, attracted attention because of their robust harmfulness. Animals are the leading carrier of these diseases and are transferred to the human body while humans visit their living places or outside traveling periods. Various germs like fungi, parasites, viruses, and bacterial cause zoonotic diseases, and it has been found that 6 out of 10 people are affected by this disease (Narrod & Zinsstag, 2012). Moreover, the International Livestock Research India has carried out a recent research survey and stated that 2.4 billion humans are suffered from the 13 types of zoonoses and a record amount of 2.2 million deaths every year (Aggarwal & Ramachandran, 2020). The highest zoonotic infectious diseases were identified in some African countries like Ethiopia, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, and Asian countries like India and China (Jones et al., 2008; Sekamatte et al., 2018; Yasobant et al., 2019). Till now, a number of emerging infectious diseases such as severe acute respiratory disease (SARS, 2003) (Saif, 2004), pathogenic avian influenza (H5N, 1996) (Claas et al., 1998) and Ebola Virus Disease (EVD, 2013) (Baize et al., 2014) are spread out worldwide. Surprisingly, in 2019 December, the world population has witnessed another significant infectious disease called novel coronavirus COVID-19 (causing a severe acute respiratory disease due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus) and causes a severe pandemic. The evolution of COVID-19 was first documented in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, Central China (Buonerba et al., 2021; Corpuz et al., 2020; Ibrahim et al., 2021; Li et al., 2020; Naddeo & Liu, 2020). According to one hypothesis, this virus was spread out from the local wet market where various animals are sold every day, including chickens, bats, marmots, pheasants, rabbits, snakes, and spotted deer, which could be the original sources. However, we may need to wait for evidence on the real sources of the virus. Overall, it is clearly shown that animal-related virus diseases are really challenging for human civilization and, in turn, for environmental sustainability. These outbreaks have shown that infectious diseases are readily transmissible to human society from the source of wildlife without any prior warning, resulting in threats to the economic scenario, well-being, and health systems. In this context, hygiene and water sanitation are a priority, and a minimum standard level must be reached and guaranteed as soon as possible by all governments worldwide. Solid waste management, water hygiene, and sanitation strategies and IPPC (Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control) are three of the key issues that environmental experts (our environmental doctors) must use for preventing any disaster and “cure” Environmental Health. In this issue of Water Environment Research, we can find valuable works that present original results, linked to WER topics, reporting solutions that can be used to “cure” and/or preserve the Environmental Health of our planet. Between these works, noteworthy is the study of Lan et al. (2021) entitled “Improving waste activated sludge dewaterability with sodium periodate pre-oxidation on extracellular polymeric substances,” where the authors present a novel conditioner, pH/NaIO4/APAM system for sludge dewatering. They adopted NaIO4, for the first time, as an advanced oxidation agent to regulate EPS of waste activated sludge and was combined with anionic polyacrylamide (APAM) as a flocculant to subsequently enhance sludge dewatering. In the same way, it is also fascinating the work of Ding et al. (2021), where it presented the separation performance and mechanism of the novel modified polyethersulfone composite nanofiltration membrane for the detection of dissolved organic nitrogen. This paper focuses on solving the problems of nanofiltration membranes that are facing nowadays with the modification of polyethersulfone (PES) composite NF membrane surface by mesoporous carbon. The ability of modified PES composite NF membrane with a different molecular weight of DON and the relationship between pore radius of membrane and interception pollutant molecular size was discussed, and a higher retention performance was found. Overall, among all papers published in this issue, the editor's choice fell on the research entitled: “Start-up of a trickling photobioreactor for the treatment of domestic wastewater” (Katam et al., 2021). In this work, the authors develop a sponge-based trickling photobioreactor (TPBR) seeded with activated sludge and microalgae for a domestic wastewater treatment system using bacteria and microalgae for residential communities. The scope of this work is highly matched with the green solutions perspective towards wastewater treatment. According to other papers recently published in the same field (Corpuz et al., 2021; Pahunang et al., 2021), this work shows the importance of the study of algae and their combination with bacteria to reduce environmental pressures and treat the wastewater streams. Overall, because of the collaborative strategy of the One Health approach, it might be a possible provision in response to worldwide challenges. Within the framework of the One Health approach, collecting laboratory data, epidemiological data, environmental monitoring data and the shared public assessment information that arises during the outbreaks of diseases may help prevent generating big scenarios (Collignon & McEwen, 2019; Rüegg et al., 2017). Comprehensive studies on the global Health of our planet are necessary. They must include the fate, occurrence, and abundance of both conventional and emerging pollutants, as well as integrated strategies/technologies for the control of direct and indirect pressures on humans, animals and the environment. The control of global health in the framework of sustainable development must be the final goal of these studies. In this vision, a multidisciplinary approach that involves knowledge for different disciplines is requested to gap current limits. Shortly, it will be more and more probable to see in the same team veterinarians, doctors, and environmental experts work together to guarantee the health of our planet and one sustainable future for all. Vincenzo Naddeo: Conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; funding acquisition; investigation; methodology; project administration; resources; software; supervision; validation; visualization.