The Economics of Prevention: Why Global Health Is Looking Beyond Hospitals
A new international brief makes the financial case for investing in animal health, food systems and disease surveillance before outbreaks become crises.
By Iris Ye · August 25, 2026 · 3 min read
NEW YORK, Aug. 25, 2026 — Some of the investments that protect human health begin far from a hospital.
A new brief released Tuesday by the Food and Agriculture Organization Investment Centre, in collaboration with the World Health Organization and the World Organisation for Animal Health, is examining what countries gain financially by investing earlier in animal health, food systems, environmental protection and disease surveillance.
The work focuses on One Health, an approach that treats human, animal, plant and ecosystem health as interconnected rather than separate policy areas. More than 60% of emerging infectious diseases reported globally come from animals, according to WHO.
A disease that eventually sends patients to clinics can begin much earlier — in livestock, wildlife, food production or environmental conditions that allow pathogens to spread. One Health seeks to identify and manage those risks closer to their source.
There is an economic argument behind that approach. WHO said Tuesday that zoonotic and other infectious diseases already cause billions of dollars in losses each year. Antimicrobial resistance presents another long-term risk. Under a high-impact scenario modeled by the World Bank, unchecked drug resistance could reduce annual global GDP by 3.8% by 2050.
Preventing those losses requires spending well before a crisis becomes visible. A 2022 World Bank analysis estimated that measures guided by One Health principles to reduce emerging infectious disease risks would cost roughly $10.3 billion to $11.5 billion globally each year.
Those investments cover work that often sits outside conventional health budgets. They can include stronger veterinary services, disease surveillance in animals, farm biosecurity, food safety systems and coordination between agricultural, environmental and public health agencies.
The scale of the need is becoming clearer. WOAH estimates that bringing Veterinary Services worldwide up to international standards would require about $2.3 billion annually. The organization argues that stronger animal health systems can protect food production and livelihoods while also reducing risks to human health.
Yet One Health investment remains limited.
Mohamed Manssouri, director of the FAO Investment Centre, said Tuesday that more quantitative evidence is needed to demonstrate the approach’s added value and help governments turn One Health priorities into investment plans. WHO has also said it will work with its partners to strengthen evidence on the impact and return on investment of One Health interventions.
Part of the difficulty is built into prevention itself. The cost of a health emergency is relatively easy to see: hospitals fill, businesses lose activity and governments spend on response. The value of an outbreak that surveillance helped prevent is harder to record.
That problem is compounded by the way public budgets are organized. Human health, agriculture, animal health and environmental protection are often funded through different agencies even when the risks they manage cross those boundaries. Spending in one sector may ultimately produce savings in another.
The latest brief reflects a broader effort to put an economic framework around those connections. FAO, WHO, WOAH and the United Nations Environment Programme work together through the One Health Quadripartite, whose joint action plan now runs through 2029.
The challenge is increasingly less about establishing that human, animal and environmental health affect one another. It is about showing where preventive spending produces measurable returns — and whether that evidence is strong enough to move money before the next crisis makes the cost of waiting visible.