Three in four emerging diseases jump from animals to people.
Three in five human infectious diseases originate in animals, a ratio that rises to three in four among newly emerging pathogens — a mathematical reality that has long outpaced the fragmented systems designed to track it. Researchers have now built OHZDIS v2.1, a unified surveillance platform drawing on five federal data streams to monitor 171 zoonotic diseases across the United States, while a parallel study of nearly eleven thousand veterinary records in South Korea reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic quietly reshaped how people protect their pets. Together, these efforts reflect a growing recognition that human health, animal health, and environmental health are not separate stories but a single one told in different registers.
- Zoonotic diseases account for 60% of all known human infections and 75% of emerging pathogens, yet surveillance systems have historically tracked humans, animals, and ecosystems in isolation — leaving dangerous blind spots where outbreaks can quietly cross species.
- OHZDIS v2.1 now stitches five federal data streams — CDC, WHO, EPA, USDA, and disease.sh — into a single near-real-time dashboard covering 171 diseases across all 50 states and five U.S. territories, making the platform publicly accessible for the first time.
- A study of 10,934 veterinary records from a South Korean clinic found pet vaccinations surged 76.4% after the pandemic, rising from an annual average of 869 cases to 1,533 — a statistically significant shift suggesting COVID-19 fundamentally altered public awareness of disease transmission.
- Dogs and cats remain unequally shielded from rabies, with vaccination rates of 11.4% and 6.7% respectively — a gap that reflects not just owner behavior but the uneven legal mandates that govern animal disease prevention across jurisdictions.
- The platform's most critical vulnerability is also its most honest admission: formal validation against existing surveillance infrastructure has not yet occurred, and until it does, OHZDIS v2.1 remains a promising prototype rather than a proven public health instrument.
Three out of every five human infectious diseases originate in animals — a ratio that climbs to three in four for newly emerging pathogens. That arithmetic has long demanded a surveillance system capable of watching human health, animal health, and environmental conditions simultaneously. OHZDIS v2.1 is the researchers' answer: a single platform integrating five federal data streams — from the CDC, WHO, EPA, USDA, and the global disease tracker disease.sh — to monitor 171 zoonotic diseases across all fifty states and five U.S. territories in near real time. It is now publicly accessible, a proof-of-concept that fragmented disease surveillance can be made coherent.
The platform arrived alongside a separate but complementary study: an analysis of nearly eleven thousand vaccination records from a single animal clinic in Dongducheon, South Korea, spanning 2017 to 2025. Dividing the timeline into pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic windows, researchers found that annual pet vaccinations jumped from an average of 869 cases before COVID-19 to 1,533 afterward — a 76 percent increase that held up under rigorous statistical testing. The pandemic, it seems, sharpened public awareness of disease transmission in ways that extended to how people care for their animals.
Within that broader trend lay a quieter inequality: dogs received rabies vaccination at a rate of 11.4 percent, cats at just 6.7 percent. The gap was statistically significant and pointed beyond individual pet owner choices toward the regulatory frameworks that mandate vaccination more strictly for dogs than for cats — a reminder that law, as much as biology, shapes who gets protected.
OHZDIS v2.1 addresses a genuine structural problem: pathogens do not respect the boundaries between veterinary medicine, public health, and environmental science. Traditional systems track each domain separately, creating the blind spots through which outbreaks travel. Yet the platform remains a prototype. Formal validation against existing surveillance infrastructure has not yet occurred, and that validation is the immediate next priority. For now, the system is open — available to epidemiologists, veterinarians, and the public alike — as an invitation to see how diseases move across species and geography, and to imagine what it might mean if that vision could actually save lives.
Three out of every five human infectious diseases jump from animals to people. That ratio climbs to three in four when you're talking about diseases that are newly emerging. The arithmetic is stark, and it has driven researchers to build something that didn't exist before: a single platform where human health, animal health, and environmental data all speak to each other in real time.
The new One Health Zoonotic Disease Intelligence System—OHZDIS v2.1—pulls together five separate federal data streams: the CDC's emerging infectious disease reports, WHO outbreak notifications, EPA water quality data, USDA agricultural records, and the disease.sh global tracker. It monitors 171 zoonotic diseases across all fifty states and five U.S. territories. The system is now publicly accessible, a proof-of-concept that the fragmented world of disease surveillance can be stitched into something coherent.
But the platform didn't emerge in a vacuum. Researchers at the same time analyzed nearly eleven thousand vaccination records from a single animal clinic in Dongducheon, South Korea, spanning from 2017 through 2025. They divided the timeline into three windows: before the pandemic, during it, and after. What they found was a sharp uptick in pet vaccinations in the years following COVID-19. Annual vaccination numbers jumped from an average of 869 cases before the pandemic to 1,533 cases afterward—a 76 percent increase. The statistical evidence was solid: the trend held up under Poisson regression analysis, and the difference between the two periods was significant at p=0.016.
The increase makes intuitive sense. A pandemic that shuttered human hospitals and overwhelmed public health systems also sharpened people's awareness of disease transmission. Pet ownership itself may have grown during lockdowns. The clinic may have expanded. Supply chains that broke in 2020 recovered. Any of these could explain the rise. The researchers were careful not to overstate their findings—a single clinic cannot prove causation, only suggest a pattern worth watching.
Within that pattern, though, lay another detail: dogs and cats were not equally protected against rabies. Dogs received rabies vaccination at a rate of 11.4 percent; cats at 6.7 percent. The difference was statistically significant and reflected something deeper than pet owner preference. Regulatory frameworks in different jurisdictions mandate rabies vaccination for dogs more strictly than for cats. The data thus became a window into how law shapes disease prevention, and how uneven that protection remains.
OHZDIS v2.1 represents an attempt to solve a real problem: zoonotic diseases don't respect the boundaries between veterinary medicine, public health, and environmental science. A pathogen circulating in wildlife can spill into livestock, then into people. Traditional surveillance systems track each domain separately, creating blind spots. The new platform integrates them into what the researchers call a near-real-time analytical pipeline—a single dashboard where a disease outbreak in animals, a contamination event in water, and a cluster of human cases can be seen together.
Yet the system is still a prototype. The researchers are explicit about this: formal validation against existing surveillance infrastructure has not yet happened. Before OHZDIS can claim to improve public health outcomes, it needs to prove it can do what it promises. That validation is the immediate next step. For now, the platform is open to the public, available to epidemiologists, veterinarians, and anyone else who wants to explore how diseases move across species and geography. Whether it becomes a tool that actually saves lives remains to be seen.
Notable Quotes
The system offers a publicly accessible proof-of-concept surveillance prototype integrating human, animal, and environmental One Health domains in a unified near-real-time analytical pipeline.— Researchers in the Zoonoses journal article
Formal prospective performance validation against existing surveillance systems is the next immediate research priority before any operational claims can be made.— Study authors
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does a single clinic's vaccination data matter when you're launching a platform that's supposed to be national?
The clinic data isn't the platform's foundation—it's a window into what the platform is meant to capture. It shows that when you look closely at one place, you see patterns that suggest larger shifts. The 76 percent increase in vaccinations tells us something changed in how people think about zoonotic risk after COVID.
But you said yourself it could be clinic expansion, or more pets, or supply chains recovering. How do you know it's actually about pandemic awareness?
You don't, not from one clinic. That's the point the researchers made. But when you see that pattern repeated across multiple data sources—human cases, animal cases, environmental markers—through a system like OHZDIS, then you start to have evidence. One clinic is a whisper. A platform integrating five federal data streams is a conversation.
The rabies vaccination gap between dogs and cats—is that a problem that needs fixing?
It reveals a problem that already exists. Regulations mandate rabies shots for dogs in most places because dogs bite people. Cats are regulated less strictly. So the data isn't saying we should vaccinate more cats; it's saying that wherever you have unequal legal requirements, you have unequal protection. The platform makes that visible.
What happens if OHZDIS fails validation? If it doesn't actually improve surveillance?
Then it remains what it is now: a proof-of-concept, a way of showing that integration is possible. But the researchers are honest about that. They're not claiming it works yet. They're saying here's the architecture, here's the data, now let's test whether it actually helps us catch outbreaks faster or predict spillover events better.
Why should someone outside public health care about this?
Because zoonotic diseases are three-quarters of all new human pathogens. The next pandemic is more likely to come from animals than from anywhere else. A system that watches animals, water, and people simultaneously is watching for the thing most likely to kill us next.