Perspective: One Health: a compelling convergence.

One Health has been defined as "the collaborative effort of multiple disciplines--working locally, nationally, and globally--to attain optimal health for people, animals, plants, and our environment." The broadly based One Health movement includes domains as diverse as agricultural and animal science, environmental science, climatology, veterinary medicine, human medicine, and public health. One Health, previously espoused by Virchow, Osler, and other pioneers in medical education, is not a new idea, but, as an approach for dealing with the many global health problems in an increasingly interconnected world, it has become more important than ever. The 1999 North American West Nile virus epidemic illustrates that pathogens can, and frequently do, have major effects on animal and human populations simultaneously and that the interface between humans and animals is frequently the source of new or resurgent diseases. Further, climate change will result in widespread alterations to environmental conditions worldwide. How humanity addresses the resulting challenges to human and animal health as well as to the world's water and food supplies will have a major impact on how, or even if, the global community survives.One Health touches on all the missions of academic health centers: population or public health, the care of individual patients, biomedical research, and health education. Texas A&M University is working to break down the barriers that have impeded collaboration among the scientific disciplines now encompassed under the One Health banner to create a whole greater than the sum of its component parts.