Zoonotic bacterial pathogens from a One Health perspective: Antimicrobial resistance, exposure pathways, and control priorities

Zoonoses are commonly defined as infectious diseases transmitted naturally from non-human animals to humans, or between humans and vertebrate animals. For bacterial pathogens, that definition is only an entry point. The public-health problem is rarely a single cross-species event. More often, risk emerges from animal carriage, intermittent shedding, food-chain contamination, occupational contact, environmental re-exposure, and vector ecology. Unlike many viral zoonoses, in which attention often centers on abrupt spillover and subsequent human-to-human transmission, bacterial zoonotic risk frequently depends on maintenance in animal hosts or production environments and on repeated human exposure through food, water, soil, aerosols, vectors, or direct contact.