What best describes One Health economics and how does it support decision making?

• A. Economic analyses that consider costs and benefits across human, animal, and environmental health to inform prevention and response investments.
• B. The study of stock prices of pharmaceutical companies.
• C. The cost of veterinary services only.
• D. Economic analyses that ignore environmental factors.

Answer: (D)

One Health economics looks at costs and benefits across human, animal, and environmental health to inform prevention and response investments. This approach supports decision making by putting diverse interventions on a common economic scale, so policymakers can compare trade-offs and allocate limited resources efficiently. It accounts for externalities—the ways actions in one sector affect others—and it includes the value of ecosystem services, which traditional single-sector analyses often overlook. By evaluating interventions like livestock vaccination, enhanced disease surveillance, and environmental management together, it helps identify strategies that yield the greatest overall health and economic returns across all species and the environment. The option that describes analyses across human, animal, and environmental health best captures this, whereas choices focusing only on veterinary costs, stock prices, or ignoring environmental factors miss essential aspects of One Health economics.