Kazakhstan has built a substantial legal foundation for tackling zoonotic diseases across the human, animal, and environmental health sectors, but the connections between those sectoral strengths remain less clearly written into law, according to a structured legal analysis published in the journal Discover Public Health. The study systematically mapped the country’s binding legal instruments relevant to zoonotic threats and scored six core laws and regulations against a framework derived from World Health Organization and Quadripartite One Health benchmarks.

The research team, led by Assem Imandossova with colleagues including Dainius Pavalkis, conducted a structured legal and policy analysis rather than an evaluation of how the laws perform in practice. Their unit of analysis was the binding national normative instrument, spanning codes, laws, government resolutions, ministerial orders, sanitary rules, and joint interministerial acts. The central question was whether the text of each instrument formally enabled specified One Health-related functions, from surveillance and laboratory diagnostics to quarantine and outbreak investigation.

To build the corpus, the authors drew on three study-team dossiers: a draft manuscript with an embedded legal synthesis, a structured registry of Kazakh regulatory acts relevant to zoonoses, and an English-language legal memorandum on intersectoral coordination during zoonotic and pandemic events. They then cross-checked every record against authoritative national legal repositories, principally the Adilet Legal Information System and, where necessary, the Paragraph legal database. Searches were conducted in Russian, English, and Kazakh, using disease terms such as anthrax, brucellosis, rabies, plague, and Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever alongside functional terms like biological safety, epizootic monitoring, quarantine, and information exchange. Initial verification ran from 1 to 31 March 2026, with a final repository check completed on 5 August 2026.

From 29 screened records, seven were excluded because they were non-binding, historical or repealed, or amendment-only acts without stand-alone relevance. The updated mapping yielded 22 active base instruments. Seventeen met the criteria for the main qualitative synthesis, comprising five framework codes or laws, one government resolution, four Ministry of Health normative acts, six Ministry of Agriculture normative acts, and one joint interministerial order. Five further instruments were retained as contextual support because they primarily specified diagnostic procedures, sample transport, or sector-specific biological-risk methodologies.

Six instruments were selected a priori for structured comparison: the Public Health Code, the Law on Veterinary Medicine, the Ministry of Health sanitary rules approved by Order No. KR DSM-114, the Joint Ministry of Health and Ministry of Agriculture Order No. 63/109 on brucellosis monitoring, the Law on Biological Safety, and the Ecological Code. Each was assessed against a 20-indicator framework covering four domains: One Health recognition and intersectoral mandates, legal enablement of prevention-preparedness-response functions, governance and accountability, and alignment with international expectations including the International Health Regulations (2005), the Tripartite Zoonoses Guide, and the Quadripartite One Health Joint Plan of Action.

The scoring system was deliberately conservative. Each domain received an ordinal score from 0 to 2, where 0 meant the function was absent, 1 meant it was addressed implicitly or partially, and 2 meant it was explicit, enforceable, and sufficiently operationalized in the legal text. Domain scores were summed to a maximum of 8 and converted to a standardized integration index. A single author carried out the assessment, with the author team reviewing the results; where provisions were ambiguous, the lower score was adopted to reduce over-interpretation of broad or indirectly inferred clauses. The authors emphasize that the indicator matrix was developed specifically for this analysis, was not externally validated, and should be read as an internally comparative and descriptive measure of formal legal architecture rather than a validated measure of implementation or institutional effectiveness.

The results reveal a layered legal architecture in which framework laws create authority while subordinate sanitary rules and joint orders supply operational detail. The Law on Biological Safety stood out as the only core instrument to receive the maximum domain score across all four domains, earning a 100 percent score on the study-specific integration index. The infectious-disease sanitary rules and the joint brucellosis monitoring order followed at 87.5 percent each. Prevention, preparedness, and response functions were the most explicitly codified domain, with five of the six instruments receiving the maximum score, while governance and accountability was the least consistently explicit, reaching the maximum in only two of six.

Taken together, the six instruments formally enable surveillance authority, source control, quarantine, restrictive measures, biosafety, and disease-specific joint monitoring. The Ministry of Health sanitary rules and the joint brucellosis monitoring order contained the clearest disease-event coordination provisions. The Ecological Code provided a broad basis for environmental governance, although its direct procedural connection to zoonotic surveillance and outbreak management was less explicit in the documents examined. The broader mapping also identified provisions on preventive vaccination, biological-risk management and classification of pathogenic agents, veterinary coordination and disease-control planning, plague and cholera prevention, veterinary diagnostic investigations, and biological-risk methodologies issued by environmental and emergency authorities.

Why does this legal plumbing matter? Kazakhstan’s zoonotic profile makes the stakes concrete. Brucellosis remains endemic and has generated substantial human and economic burden. The country hosts more than 30 species of human-biting ixodid ticks, and studies have documented Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever across historically affected and additional at-risk territories. Rabies remains an established national priority, with continuing animal-human transmission risks. Historical plague foci, viral findings in bats, and avian-influenza dynamics associated with Central Asian flyways all generate early signals in animals, vectors, laboratories, or environmental monitoring before changes appear in clinical human surveillance. When the legal interfaces among these information streams are explicit, the authors argue, authorities have a clearer basis for timely information exchange, joint interpretation, and preventive action. Where the interface is unspecified, useful sectoral information may remain trapped in parallel administrative pathways even when each sector functions within its mandate.

The study identifies its principal opportunity not as creating sectoral authority from scratch, but as connecting existing legal capacities across routine governance, information exchange, risk assessment, and environmental interfaces. Integrated surveillance is currently most explicit for selected diseases, particularly brucellosis, rather than being uniformly framed as a multi-hazard function. Event-specific duties are generally clearer than standing arrangements for reporting cycles, shared prioritization, financing expectations, and joint assessment between emergencies. The authors suggest that a government resolution or framework by-law could clarify the scope of One Health, participating sectors, and reporting relationships, while secondary regulations could specify interoperable data exchange, shared minimum datasets, laboratory referral pathways, and joint outbreak-investigation arrangements. Environmental bridge provisions could define how signals relating to wildlife, vectors, water, waste, land use, or ecological change enter risk assessment without displacing existing environmental mandates.

The authors are careful about what their findings do and do not show. Because this was a legal-text analysis, the potential benefits of stronger integration are reasoned implications rather than directly measured effects. The study did not evaluate implementation fidelity, institutional performance, financing, workforce capacity, compliance, or health outcomes. The six core instruments were purposively selected for comparability and cannot represent every technical provision in the broader corpus, and descriptive statistics based on six documents are exploratory. Legal instruments may also have been amended after the final search cut-off of 5 August 2026, and the focus on zoonotic threats does not constitute a complete legal assessment of all One Health domains, including antimicrobial resistance and food safety. Future research, they conclude, should assess how the mapped provisions operate in practice and whether additional integration improves preparedness, prevention, and response outcomes.

Subject of Research: A structured legal analysis mapping Kazakhstan's binding legal instruments for zoonotic disease prevention, preparedness, and response against One Health benchmarks.

Article Title: Assessing the legal framework for One Health in zoonotic disease prevention, preparedness, and response in Kazakhstan

Article References: Imandossova, A., Zhumagaliuly, A., Bukharbayeva, A., & Pavalkis, D. (2026). Assessing the legal framework for One Health in zoonotic disease prevention, preparedness, and response in Kazakhstan. Discover Public Health, 23(1), Article 1744. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12982-026-03238-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12982-026-03238-6

Keywords: Kazakhstan, One Health, zoonotic diseases, legal framework, brucellosis, rabies, Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, biological safety, surveillance, public health law, intersectoral coordination, Discover Public Health