Everyday Wins: Integrating One Health Project by Project

Imagine a humid evening in rural Southeast Asia, 2028. The darkening sky over a row of farms. The buzz of mosquitos. The dripping of water in an unusually long monsoon season. A farmer notices his pigs coughing strangely, while his daughters battle unusual headaches. By dawn, villagers will be reporting dead fish in the river, and local health workers will be arriving as fever cases spike. Although initial samples hint at something brand new, no one has any idea what may be happening, much less what to do about it.

Panic spreads. Local markets close, tourism plummets, smallholders lose animal sales (wiping out their seasonal income), people stay home from work, and migrants face blame and border closures. Within weeks, economic ripples begin to hit. Millions in trade is wiped out of the economy, schools close, and remittances home from abroad dry up. The usual responses – veterinarians treating the animals, clinicians caring for the people, environmentalists sampling the water and air, countries trying to tackle the threat alone – all fail.

Closer Than It Seems

This fictional outbreak echoes real Southeast Asian risks – like the 1998-1999 Nipah virus epidemic in Malaysia’s Perak, Negeri Sembilan, and Selangor states (killing 105 of 265 cases, nearly collapsing the pig industry via bat-pig-human spillover), leptospirosis surges after the post-2014 Kelantan floods in Malaysia (spiking cases amid contaminated floodwaters), and the recurrent Thai outbreaks in northeastern paddies. All are risks that all have in common the same things: increased encroachment of humans into the natural world, changing climate conditions, and the unassailable logic of rapidly evolving pathogens.

They also underscore One Health’s power: by breaking down siloes and enabling the integrated stewardship of human, animal, and environmental health across communities and borders, communities are able to respond to even the scariest outbreak.

ASEAN-UK Health Security Partnership (HSP)’s Vision: One Health as Core, Not Add-On

The HSP programme champions One Health (OH) as the best way for ASEAN to fortify against pandemics and climate-driven threats, viewing it as an essential resilience building tool for multi-sectoral, equitable, climate-aware action. The programme funds initiatives that embed OH across grants and peer exchanges for priorities like zoonoses, emergency response, antimicrobial resistance, climate-health risks, workforce development, digital health, and food safety. Critically, HSP asks the applicants to align their activities and outputs with ASEAN’s One Health Joint Plan of Action (OH-JPA 2025-2030) and Quadripartite tools, and the HSP team supports grantees to implement projects that advance the six core OH elements: shared understanding, multi-sectoral workforce, governance/ financing, joint evidence/risk assessment, integrated planning, and shared monitoring.

Why prioritise this? In a nutshell, OH approaches deliver stronger problem analysis, helping spot shared drivers of health risks (e.g., land-use changes fueling spillovers). These approaches create clearer pathways to health security through multisectoral prevention, detection, and response. They also ensure perfect alignment with National Action Plans for Health Security (NAPHS), International Health Regulations (IHR), and the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA). By incorporating these ideas as concrete approaches, project can fill critical gaps and transform principles into resilient, real-world systems.

Everyday Wins: Integrating One Health Project by Project

Even projects not explicitly focused on OH, such as digital surveillance or human resources training, can mainstream these principles effectively using practical tools that directly counter outbreaks like our fictional scenario:

Early multisectoral coordination during outbreak ignition: When pigs start coughing and humans develop fevers, routine check-ins between ministries (health, agriculture, environment via networks like the ASEAN One Health Network or ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Animal Health and Zoonoses (ACCAHZ) activate joint response teams well before full panic sets in. In the scenario above, this approach averts prolonged market shutdowns by quickly confirming the threat isn’t food borne, thereby stabilising farmer incomes, restoring tourism confidence, and keeping smallholders productively engaged rather than isolated and desperate.

Joint data ecosystems amid escalation: Harmonised dashboards, integrated with platforms like the one managed by the ASEAN Biological Threats Surveillance Centre, seamlessly merge veterinary data on sick pigs, environmental scans of mosquitoes and dead fish, and human syndromic reports – rapidly pinpointing the bat spillover amid flood conditions. Without siloed delays, this shared intelligence halts unfounded blame on migrants, prevents chaotic border closures and remittance disruptions, and enables precise, targeted quarantines that dramatically slash broader economic losses.

Field-grounded capacity building for swift response: Multi-sector Field Epidemiology Training Programme (FETP+) teams, prepped through ongoing simulation exercises (SimEx), deploy immediately to affected villages to trace exposures, vaccinate pigs, and fog mosquito breeding sites. Community and household caregivers receive tailored Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) training, allowing schools to reopen faster and easing food shortages along with financial hardships for families. This boosts the critical 7-1-7 timeliness metric (case detection to response), transforming community fear into trust and collaboration.

Ownership through co-design for long-term recovery: By collaboratively adapting OH-JPA standard operating procedures (SOPs) into localised plans, governments take full ownership of post-outbreak surveillance efforts – empowering health, agriculture and environment ministers to reference the data directly in policymaking and scaling prevention measures to avoid future recurrences. In our scenario, this rebuilds trade confidence quickly and sustains vital remittances by demonstrating proven regional resilience.

Pathways to Sustainability and Scale

National ownership is always going to be the engine driving enduring impact, and OH can accelerate this by making systems more interconnected and robust. Rather than standalone pilots, HSP grantees are encouraged to anchor activities directly into existing national systems – for surveillance, labs, and response mechanisms – to ensure they persist long after HSP funding ends. Projects lacking a OH lens risk remaining in silos, hoarding data, duplicating efforts across sectors, and overlooking upstream drivers like biodiversity loss or climate shifts.

Incorporating OH eases the transition to self-sustaining operations. Government buy-in facilitates scaling through domestic budgets, while formal Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) lock in ongoing coordination. Consider the illustrative vignette from the technical paper, a multi-country zoonoses grant that harmonises dashboards across sectors, conducts joint training, and activates platforms like ACPHEED during outbreaks, this delivers co-benefits for ecosystems and livelihoods – much like swiftly containing our fictional ASEAN country crisis – while building lasting infrastructure.

Takeaways for HSP Applicants

• HSP equips you to operationalise OH, regardless of focus.
• Boost your competitive edge: OH markedly enhances proposed project relevance, credibility, and long-term sustainability, which are key criteria for reviewers evaluating alignment with OH core elements and ASEAN Health Priorities (HPs).
• Applicants should start by anchoring your proposals in specific ASEAN Member State (AMS) gaps identified through tools like SPAR or JEE assessments. Propose using OH tools such as Joint Risk Assessments (JRAs) or progress scorecards, and weave in Gender, Equity, Disability, Social Inclusion (GEDSI) and climate lenses throughout.