Anthropology and One Health: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Diseases Emergence

“One Health” is a holistic vision of health based on its study and management under a transdisciplinary approach of different sciences. While health is understood as the result of a balance between a set of factors that affect the interface human-animal-environment, the disease is the result of an imbalanced interface on which human activities are determinant. Health promotion and disease prevention strategies should be based on understanding the human role in this interface at the population level. An overview of the most important epidemics (pandemics) along with the history and their risk factors, most of them linked to human activities, suggests the weight of social determinants in disease emergence and evolution. Anthropology is presented not only as the science contributing to explaining these human activities that imbalance the human, animal, and environment interface in epidemics, but also as science involved in the design of strategies to solve those diseases. Medical Anthropology, a subfield of Anthropology, working together with Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine in a transdisciplinary approach, can contribute to analyzing cultural determinants and designing social education and risk communication strategies for health promotion and disease prevention from a “One Health” point of view.