Towards One Health? Evolution of international collaboration networks on Nipah virus research from 1999-2011

The world is now facing the emergence of new pathogens and the return of old ones at an unprecedented speed. Among the wide range of emerging diseases, zoonoses – infections naturally transmitted between vertebrate animals and humans – represent a new complex global problem for public health and require new forms of science leading to new forms of governance. The One Health policy concept developed a few years ago by international public health institutions proposes that research institutions gather together animal, human and environmental health research by intensifying cooperation among scholars working on zoonoses at the global scale. Unfortunately, and after years of promotion of One Health throughout the world, the policy still seems to be blocked at the stage of a bourgeoning movement, with no concrete achievements and little evidence of successful implementation found in the literature. This paper consider the worldwide research carried out about Nipah virus, an emerging zoonotic agent, and explores the extent to which patterns of international scientific collaboration have evolved since Nipah’s emergence. Through the combination of bibliometrics, social network analysis (SNA) and a collection of researcher narratives, this work presents insights on the evolution of scientific networks associated with an emerging zoonosis such as Nipah and discusses the consistency of these networks with One Health policy.

One of a series of seven working papers considering the political economy of One Health,