One Health as hegemony dispute: An answer from the perspective of Brazilian collective health

Abstract

In response to multilateral agreements and corporate interests, Brazil began to promote the ‘One Health’ (OH) approach, contradicting the explanatory model of social determination of the process health-disease, which had been developed in Latin America. The expanded concept on health underpinned the Brazilian health reform and the health chapter in the 1988 Federal Constitution, placing health at the center of social policies and enabling it to face the challenges of contemporary health crises. This essay aims to: recover the history of the OH approach; analyze possible impacts on Brazilian health policy; and warn of possible setbacks in the understanding of health like was before decades prior to 1970. To develop it, the authors conducted a documentary study on the agent-host-environment triad that guides OH to solution complex situations, but without considering that these mainly result from the exploitation of nature and bodies, the precariousness of work and territories. The authors show that OH is a repetition of past formulas and foreign interventions that disregards the sovereign health policy developed in Brazil. In conclusion: Human orientation responds in a functionalist way to the issues of zoonoses and epizootics, and its linearity makes it difficult to act on the complex processes of expropriation of nature and society, ecological collapse, and climate change.