Advancing Towards the Concrete Implementation of One Health Infectious Disease Control Measures Within Migrant Camps: The Importance of (Re)aligning Policy Language with Experts’ Field-Based Priorities

Abstract Migrant camps (i.e., formal and informal settlements for refugees and displaced individuals) represent extreme realities where the interplay between biological, environmental, and socio-political factors pose many challenges to the control of infectious diseases. Current guidelines and policies to manage health in camps adopt anthropocentric-biomedical reductionist narratives, contrasting with the scientific advocacy for holistic public health measures. This divergence poses the question whether guidelines are aligned with field-based priorities. To explore this question, experts’ health perspectives were investigated through online semi-structured interviews exploring to what extent a One Health perspective was implemented at the field level. Given the discursive power of policy documents in influencing field implementation, official guidelines were thematically analysed to investigate their capacity to enable holistic public health measures’ implementation in migrant camps. Respondents confirmed the anthropocentric focus of health policies which led to the practical exclusion of both environmental and animal health expertise in the teams involved in the management of health services and control of infectious diseases in migrant camps. Experts stressed the need for culturally sensitive, socio-politically aligned policy discourses to reframe disease control measures for properly meeting the health needs of migrants and displaced people. Finally, this case suggests that embedding equity and fairness in health policy frameworks would help deconstruct hierarchical health narratives and foster holistic approaches that recognize human, animal, and environmental health as an integral part of one single whole. Information © The Author 2025