United States - Apex, North Carolina - Wednesday 30 June 2021
There is an emerging need for a better understanding of what One Health is all about. To meet this need, on Wednesday, June 30, the One Health Commission, in partnership with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Wilson Center, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, launched the first in a series of One Health in the U.S. webinars — ‘Part 1 - One Health 101: What is All the Fuss?’
One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and trans-disciplinary approach to achieve optimal health and well-being for humans, animals, plants, and their shared environment. One Health recognizes that the health of people, animals, and the environment are inextricably interconnected. We cannot have healthy people without healthy animals, and we cannot have healthy animals without a healthy environment.
The first webinar, ‘One Health 101: What is All the Fuss?’, featured an overview of the One Health framework, systems and policies, and highlighted best practices in preventing the next pandemic. Freelance Reporter Jimmy Tobias narrated a true One Health success story about the Bracken Cave in San Antonio and the bats that dwell there and a proposed development that would have jeopardized the health of both the animals and people.
Professorial Lecturer Dr. Bernadette Dunham stated “There needs to be sharing of the data collected from [disease] surveillance programs, epidemiological and laboratory investigations, risk assessments, research and educational outreach activities - which means fostering a One Health, cross-sectoral collaboration among the different relevant sectors at regional, national and international levels: because we travel, animals and plants travel and the microbes travel. Borders do not matter to pathogens……..I do think we are at an important crossroad in our thinking because One Health can appeal to people at a personal level”.
“I like to think of One Health as an approach for wicked, terribly complex problems……. there is often no single discipline or no single agency that you can point to to say ‘Fix this!’.... We need to find ways to work in advance of these problems as they come up…. One Health is that approach…..If we use a One Health approach and we make that a foundation for the [disease] surveillance that our governments do, we can do this surveillance often at lower cost and it can be more sustainable,” said Duke University epidemiologist (disease detective) Dr. Greg Gray.
All webinars are open to the public and will be recorded.