The cow, the flea and the genome: One Health and the statecraft of prevention

In the second of his Major Rock Edicts, cut into stone in the third century BCE, Ashoka records that he has provided medical care of two kinds, for people and for animals, and has had healing herbs planted wherever they were lacking. Twenty-three centuries before the phrase existed, an Indian State treated the health of humans, animals and the land as a single charge of government. Rudolf Virchow, who introduced the word ‘zoonosis’, restated the idea for the age of the microscope: between animal and human medicine there is no dividing line, nor should there be.