WOAH's 2026 State of the World's Animal Health Report Is Out. The Numbers Are Hard to Look At — and Impossible to Ignore.

The World Organisation for Animal Health released the second edition of its State of the World's Animal Health report this month, and the opening line sets the tone for everything that follows. The situation it describes, the authors write, is more urgent than the one they documented a year ago.

That is not rhetorical framing. The data in this report earns that sentence.

Foot and mouth disease has caused unprecedented outbreaks in Southern Africa. New World screwworm has tens of thousands of confirmed cases across Central America and is closing in on the United States border. Lumpy skin disease reached Western Europe for the first time. Avian influenza recorded more than 2,000 outbreaks in animals during the period covered by this report, spreading to new species and new geographies, with 140 million animals lost and still no confirmed sustained human-to-human transmission. The word yet appears in the report.

Against that disease pressure, the financing landscape for prevention is moving in the wrong direction. Official development assistance fell to $174.3 billion in 2025, a 23 percent decline from the previous year. It was the largest single-year contraction on record and the second consecutive year of decline, effectively erasing a decade of growth in global health aid. And in a tightening fiscal environment, the investments most likely to be cut are exactly the ones that prevent crises rather than respond to them.

The investment gap in plain numbers

More than 20 percent of global animal production is lost to preventable disease every year. That destruction cascades into higher food prices, disrupted trade, and weakened livelihoods for the 1.3 billion people who depend on farmed animals for food and income.

Less than $1 billion per year in development aid currently reaches Veterinary Services and zoonotic disease prevention globally. That is less than 2.5 percent of an already shrinking global health aid budget directed at what WOAH calls the frontline of pandemic prevention.

Bringing Veterinary Services worldwide up to international standards would cost approximately $2.3 billion per year. That number sounds large until you place it next to this one: COVID-19 caused $13.8 trillion in economic damage. The full funding gap represents less than 0.05 percent of what that single pandemic cost in a single year. The report is direct about what that comparison means. The choice is not between spending and saving. It is between planned investment and unplanned loss.

Why this is a veterinary profession argument, not just a policy argument

Seventy-five percent of emerging infectious diseases in humans originate in animals. Around 60 percent of known human infectious diseases have animal origins. Rabies alone kills an estimated 59,000 people every year, almost entirely preventably, because a dog vaccine costs a few dollars while human post-exposure treatment averages over $100 per person. Acting in animals is consistently cheaper and more effective than treating people downstream. That is not a hypothesis. It is a documented pattern across disease after disease.

The report makes the return on investment case explicitly. Studies show returns on animal health investment of up to 86 percent per year, placing it among the most productive investments available to any society. The UK FMD outbreak in 2001 cost £8 billion and required the culling of over six million animals. When the same country invested in preparedness, a 2007 outbreak was contained in 58 days at a cost of £47 million. Same country. Same disease. Completely different outcome because of what happened in the years between outbreaks.

That comparison is the core argument of this entire report, and it is one that veterinary professionals have been making in various forms for their entire careers. The systems that protect animal health, when they work, are invisible. Nobody writes headlines about the pandemic that did not happen. Nobody celebrates the outbreak that was caught in two farms instead of two continents. The return on that investment is real and it is enormous, but it accrues silently, which makes it perpetually vulnerable to being cut.

The workforce and capacity picture

The report draws on WOAH's Performance of Veterinary Services data to show where the gaps between commitment and capacity remain greatest. Eighty percent of assessed members improved or maintained emergency preparedness and response capacity, which sounds positive until you consider that 20 percent did not. Antimicrobial use in animals declined by 4 percent between 2022 and 2024, but 19 percent of members still use antimicrobials for growth promotion. Without action, AMR could cause over 39 million human deaths by 2050 and $953 billion in animal production losses, yet animal vaccines receive just seven cents of every $10 spent on AMR-related research.

Only 20 percent of members assessed by the PVS system had veterinary legislation explicitly addressing animal welfare. Seventy-five percent of assessed members had limited or no alignment with international standards. The data shows that disease risks are increasing and spreading faster while animal health systems remain uneven and under strain.

What the report asks for

The report closes with an argument that should be familiar to everyone working in this profession. No government can manage transboundary disease risk alone. No sector can absorb the costs in isolation. Animal health must be financed as a global public good because the benefits it generates cross every border and the risks of underinvestment are shared by all.

The report is not abstract about what that looks like. It profiles a veterinarian in Colombia traveling by boat into the Amazon for up to six hours to train community members as an early warning network. It describes Norway eliminating 99 percent of antibiotic use in its salmon industry through sustained investment in vaccination and disease prevention. These are not exceptional stories held up as inspiration. They are examples of what consistent, well-designed investment delivers. They are scalable. They are replicable.

The profession WOAH is making this case to includes every veterinary professional reading this article. You are the workforce this report is about. The veterinary services gaps it documents are staffed by people who trained the way you trained, who face the resource constraints you face, who make the clinical and public health decisions this entire investment argument depends on.

The full 2026 State of the World's Animal Health report is available at woah.org. Read it. Share it. The data in it belongs in every conversation about why this profession matters.