One Health and the Cost of Destroying Our Own Future

One Health and Our Future Are More Than a Diagram

I can drive twenty kilometres along a road in East Sumba and see plastic waste almost without interruption: bottles, bags, wrappers, scattered through grass and drains. I remember when it was not like this. What disturbs me most is how ordinary it has become. People pass it. Local authorities aren’t responding at the scale this demands. We get used to what should be unacceptable. When did we lose the ability to recognise what is ugly, what is beautiful and what we are destroying? The question of One Health and our future begins here, on the roadside, not in a conference hall.

Poverty is not the same as indifference.

It is easy to accuse people of not caring. But when your daily questions are how to find food, drinking water or somewhere to wash, the future shrinks to the next twenty-four hours. These are not trivial worries. They are survival. Poverty steals the time and freedom needed to think beyond tomorrow. Responsibility cannot fall equally on a family struggling to eat, a company profiting from disposable products and authorities responsible for public services. We must not confuse exhaustion with indifference.

And still, look at the larger picture. We poison the water we must drink, pollute the air we must breathe and destroy habitats that help sustain life. We consume energy as if its consequences could be sent somewhere else. We treat animals as companions when it suits us and as disposable production units when it does not. When education and public services fail, people lose the tools to respond. The ozone layer is recovering because governments agreed to stop using chemicals that damaged it. Collective action works. And yet we are choosing collective self-destruction. This is a kind of self-mutilation on a planetary scale. We cut away what keeps us alive, then wonder why we are sick. The burden is shared profoundly unequally.

We are creating new opportunities for infection.

Disrupting habitats and increasing contact between wildlife, livestock and people can open new paths for pathogens. The World Health Organisation explains that most emerging infectious diseases originate in animals. Other infections move through unsafe water, food and mosquitoes. Antimicrobial resistance makes some infections harder to treat. Nature has never been free of disease. But our actions change exposure, transmission and the capacity of health systems to protect people. When we attack the balance around us, we also undermine our own defences.

In East Sumba, our teams treat infections and study what prevents people with possible sepsis from reaching care in time. An infection can become life-threatening when diagnosis, antibiotics or referral come too late. I encounter clinical problems that I remember seeing less often. That is my experience, not proof of a regional trend. We need to investigate these signals carefully. But we cannot keep asking medicines to compensate for unsafe water, pollution, poverty and delays in care. Medicine can save lives. It cannot, alone, make a damaged environment healthy.

The next pandemic is not an abstract fear.

I believe another pandemic will come. I don’t know when, where, or how severe it will be, and nobody can honestly predict that. Not every outbreak becomes a pandemic. That is why surveillance and prevention matter. COVID-19 showed us how one infection could disrupt healthcare, schooling, livelihoods and trust. Yet we have already made so much of that experience feel distant. What frightens me is not only the next pathogen. It is our ability to normalise the conditions that make us vulnerable.

And I think of the children born today. What exactly are we leaving them? Why bring children into a future we keep making less safe? This is not a judgement of parents. It is a question for every adult, institution and industry that knows the cost of its decisions. At Fair Future Foundation, alongside Kawan Baik Indonesia, we work on Acqua pulita, community healthcare, malaria prevention and education because these connections are real. They are practical responses, not a cure for a broken system. We are injuring ourselves and calling it progress. We cannot keep making the world sick and expect medicine to repair the damage afterwards.

Alex Wettstein – Fair Future Foundation