Application of Graphs in a One Health Framework.

Abstract

The One Health framework, which advocates the crucial interconnection between environmental, animal, and human health and well-being, is becoming of increasing importance and acceptance in health sciences over the last years. The hottest public health topics of the latest years, like zoonotic diseases (e.g., the recent pandemic) or the increasing antibiotic resistance, characterized by many as "pandemic of the future," make the more holistic and combinatorial approach of One Health a necessity to combat such complex problems. Multiple graphs and graph theory have found applications in health sciences for many years, and they can now extend to usage across all levels of a One Health approach to health, ranging from genome, one disease level, to epidemiology and ecosystem graphs. For that last ecosystem layer, a proposed approach is the utilization of process graphs from the chemical engineering field, in order to understand a whole system and what constitute the most crucial aspects of a One Health issue in ecosystem level. Here P-graphs are focused alongside their combinatorial algorithms, implemented in R, and their application researched in an effort to extract information and plan interventions.