Jakob Zinsstag-Klopfenstein

Prof. Dr. Jakob Zinsstag is a veterinarian with a PhD in tropical animal health. He spent eight years in West Africa at the International Trypanotolerance Centre in The Gambia and four years as the director of the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques in Côte d’Ivoire. Since 1998 he heads a research group on human and animal health at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. Since 2011 his is deputy head of department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Swiss TPH. He focuses on the control of zoonoses in developing countries and the provision of health care to mobile pastoralists using a One Health approach. He is past president of the International Association for Ecology and Health and president of the scientific board of the Transdisciplinary network of the Swiss Academies and currently co-chair of the Transdisciplinarity working group of the Global Science Forum of OECD. Jakob Zinsstag is the author of a comprehensive textbook on One Health presenting necessary and sufficient criteria to fulfill a One Health approach. One Health as a problem-solving concept combining research and public health action in an iterative process. To fully understand the range of potential benefits implies a deeper and comprehensive recognition and understanding of how humans and animals and their environment are interrelated. Equally important, it requires a demonstration and documentation of the benefits and added values resulting from the cross-talk and closer cooperation between human and animal health. One Health can thus be defined as any added value in terms of health of humans and animals, financial savings or environmental services achievable by the cooperation of human and veterinary medicine when compared to the two medicines working separately (Zinsstag 2015).