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Monitoring Chemical Environmental Hazards Through Wildlife Assessment: A Review Within the “One Health” Approach
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Wildlife species serve as sentinels for chemical contamination including microplastics, metals, and pesticides within the One Health framework, yet systematic monitoring of game meat for these pollutants remains rare. Because microplastics have been detected in wild animals consumed as food, this review underscores the need for standardized surveillance to protect human health through the food chain.
Wildlife acts as a sentinel of environmental pollution, providing critical insights into potential risks to human health within the One Health framework. However, knowledge on the occurrence of legacy and emerging contaminants in wildlife, as well as their potential trophic transfer to humans, remains limited. Thus, monitoring contaminants in terrestrial wildlife, particularly in game species, is especially relevant, as game meat represents an important source of high-quality protein that must be safeguarded. This review summarizes current evidence on chemical contaminant levels in terrestrial wildlife from a “One Health” perspective. Despite the growing relevance of this approach, few studies have explicitly applied this term, and even fewer have focused on game meat, resulting in an incomplete picture of contamination. Although reported contaminants—metals, metalloids, pesticides, microplastics, and mycotoxins—originate from overlapping natural and anthropogenic sources, such as ammunition, agriculture, and industrial activities, a strong dependence on local environmental conditions continues to hamper cross-regional comparisons and the establishment of representative exposure levels. Overall, this review highlights the need for systematic monitoring of contaminants in terrestrial wildlife, with emphasis on emerging pollutants that are currently underrepresented in literature, to improve risk assessment, protect food safety, and better understand the impacts of environmental contamination on animal and human health.
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Domestic and wild animals as sentinels for environmental monitoring of emerging contaminants: a One Health framework for biomonitoring and human exposure assessment.
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This review paper summarizes existing research on using pets, farm animals, and wildlife to track pollutants like PFAS chemicals, microplastics, and pesticides in the environment. It proposes a monitoring framework showing how signals from these animals could help identify contamination hotspots and guide further checks on human exposure, though animal findings alone cannot prove human health risk.
A Review: Impact of Environmental Contaminants on Wildlife
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This review synthesizes global evidence on how pesticides, plastics, heavy metals, PFAS, and other contaminants harm wildlife across terrestrial and aquatic taxa, identifying under-studied regions, taxonomic gaps, and compounding interactions with climate change and biological invasions. The review highlights plastics and microplastics as a growing threat requiring standardized monitoring protocols and integrated conservation strategies to protect biodiversity.
Biomonitoring Environmental Contaminants in Aquatic Ecosystems: A One Health Perspective
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Fish, birds, and shellfish living in our lakes, rivers, and oceans are like early-warning systems for pollution—when scientists study the plastics, heavy metals, and chemicals building up in these animals, it reveals what's likely ending up in our water and food supply too. This review found surprisingly few studies (just 14) have connected the dots between wildlife pollution and human health, even though microplastics were the most commonly studied contaminant. The takeaway: we need more research linking environmental contamination in animals to human health risks, since what accumulates in fish and waterbirds today may be a preview of what affects us tomorrow.
Environmental pollution and One Health: An integrated threat to global health
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This review examines environmental pollution through the One Health lens, exploring how chemical contaminants, biological agents, and physical pollutants move between ecosystems, animals, and human populations. Researchers highlight that pollutants such as heavy metals, microplastics, and persistent organic compounds accumulate through food chains and disrupt biological systems across species. The study emphasizes that addressing pollution effectively requires coordinated approaches spanning human medicine, veterinary science, and environmental management.
Environmental pollution and One Health: An integrated threat to global health
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This review examines environmental pollution through the One Health framework, which recognizes the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health. Researchers found that pollutants including heavy metals, microplastics, and chemical contaminants circulate continuously between ecosystems, animals, and human populations, creating cascading health effects. The study calls for integrated, cross-disciplinary approaches to address pollution as a shared threat across all domains of health.
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