Key leaders emphasise importance of One Health strategy
On 3 October, an important debate, discussing the global threat of anti-microbial resistance (AMR) and high risk disease, took place at the RVC, London.
The debate was spearheaded by Professor Stuart Reid, principal of the RVC, and Professor Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
During the event, both leaders emphasised the importance of implementing the One Health policy, an initiative that both enables and uses pioneering research from the world’s experts, to protect the health of all species.
The risk of shared disease between humans and animals, combined with the decreased ability to treat them, is now considered to require urgent action by the RVC and LSHTM.
Professor Reid, an expert on AMR, and Professor Piot, founding executive director of UNAIDS and co-discoverer of Ebola, urged the importance of drastic and imminent action.
As leaders of the One Health movement, they emphasised that specialists from the medical, veterinary, political, economic and environmental sectors needed to work together in order to establish and execute global life saving measures.
The event, hosted in partnership with New Scientist, comes just weeks after UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, acknowledged AMR as a “fundamental threat” to global health and emphasised immediate action via a One Health approach.
Professor Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “Fighting emerging infectious disease and drug resistance requires a multidisciplinary approach that considers the complex links between human and animal health.
"Ebola, HIV, influenza, SARS and MERS are examples of epidemics that have jumped between species; and in the case of Zika, malaria, yellow fever and dengue, the microbe relies on an intermediary species, such as mosquitoes, to infect humans. These infections take an enormous toll on public health globally.
"Research is essential to combat these deadly diseases, from developing vaccines to understanding human-animal transmission pathways. This, along with the rise of drug resistant strains of infectious agents, creates an urgency to act fast and to be better prepared.”
Professor Stuart Reid, Principal of the Royal Veterinary College, added: “There can be no bigger issue than the global threat of diseases for which may soon have no treatment. It is going to take the concerted effort of science, industry, governments and international organisations to address this impending catastrophe that is truly species independent and a One Health problem.
"Our focus must be to address the significant gaps in our understanding at the same time as doing what we know to be “the right thing” – everybody has a part to play and we must do it together.”
Clare Wilson, Medical News Reporter at New Scientist, said: “One of the greatest future threats to health is of a new infectious disease passing from animals to humans, such as HIV, Ebola and Zika have done in the past.
"We also know that antibiotic resistance, another grave public health challenge, is worsened by overuse of antibiotics in farming. So it’s vital that medical researchers in animal and human health work more closely together.”
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