One World, One Health

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Lots of factors make rabies the scariest virus known. It kills virtually 100% of its victims, and it’s killing close to 60,000 people a year around the world – many of them young children. Animals can carry and transmit the virus even if they have no symptoms at all, and people can develop a fatal and untreatable infection even if they do not know they’ve been exposed by a bite, scratch, or a drop of saliva. 

Rabies is probably the basis for myths about zombies and vampires, says Dr. Abi Vanak of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in Bangalore, India. It’s carried and spread by bats, raccoons, foxes, wolves, and, perhaps most important, dogs.

In this episode, Dr. Abi Vanak chats with us about how the One Health approach can help reduce the spread of rabies.

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All humanity relies on forests. Even if you don’t live near one, they produce the air you breathe and are a source of food, clean water, wood, and even medicines.

But people are destroying forests at an unprecedented rate, and it’s hurting not just the forests and the animals and plants in them but also human health. Diseases such as Ebola, hantavirus, Zika, chikungunya, and, yes, Covid, can all be traced to human interaction with animals of the forests.

In this episode of One World, One Health, Dr. Paula Prist, Senior Research Scientist at the EcoHealth Alliance, tells host Maggie Fox about how some of these diseases emerge and how damaging forests can hurt all of us.

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Everyone’s heard the saying about how a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane half a world away. In this episode, we chat with One Health Trust (OHT) Founder and President Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan about how OHT’s new center in the Nimai Valley outside Bangalore, India, will incorporate this idea into its design and intent. Butterflies are fragile, but vital pollinators, and they can represent how interconnected the world is.

So will the Nimai Valley Center, which will be entirely powered by solar energy, will collect its own water, and produce organic foods onsite to help feed researchers, students, and guests from around the world. The hope is to create a space where people can apply One Health concepts to solving the problems of new and old diseases, poor diet, and climate change. The idea is as ancient as the civilizations of South Asia, China, Africa, and the Americas and as modern as the science showing disrupting the environment can fuel the spread of disease, says Ramanan.

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Two centuries ago, people could die from a simple scratch. It was the pre-antibiotic era when infections killed babies within hours, a cold could turn deadly within days, and people survived injuries through luck alone.

Now a pill can prevent strep throat from turning into scarlet fever and antibiotics keep surgery safe. But because bacteria evolve and mutate so quickly, many drugs are powerless against new strains. The world needs new and better antibiotics.

In this episode of One World, One Health, Anand Anandkumar, co-founder and chief executive officer of Bugworks, explains what his company is doing to help discover and develop new antibiotics. Antibiotics are not big money makers for pharmaceutical companies, so Bugworks is putting together funding from governments, charities, and a new kind of motivated investor.

Listen as Anand Anandkumar tells host Maggie Fox about what his company is trying to do.

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Drug-resistant superbugs are killers. They directly kill more than a million people a year, the World Health Organization says, and contribute to five million deaths a year.

But vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected in the first place, so why not make better use of vaccines to fight these superbugs? In this episode, Dr. David Heymann, a veteran of the war against infectious diseases, tells us how vaccines might be put to better use to prevent antimicrobial-resistant organisms.

Dr. David Heymann spent more than 25 years at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with more than 20 of those years on secondment to the World Health Organization. He is also a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

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In this episode, Dr. Nicholas White of the University of Oxford in the UK and Mahidol University in Thailand tells us how the world is losing ground in the fight against malaria, in no small part because of the emergence of resistance.

Malaria is caused by a parasite transmitted by mosquitoes, and these parasites have repeatedly evolved to escape the effects of drug after drug over the decades. Now, Dr. White argues, there’s a chance to get out ahead of this resistance. How?

Listen as he tells our host Maggie Fox how the parasite manages to evade the effects of drugs and what he thinks needs to be done to stop it from happening yet again.

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In this episode, Thomas Van Boeckel tells us about how aquaculture might be helping drive the rise of drug-resistant superbugs around the world.

Three-quarters of antibiotics sold globally go to farmed animals. Some of these animals are fish and shrimp.

Thomas Van Boeckel studies the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and other drug-resistant microbes at the Department of Environmental Systems Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-- known as ETH Zurich. He’s also a visiting fellow at the One Health Trust.

People need to pay attention to the use of antibiotics in aquaculture, he says. No one’s even measuring it right now, he tells host Maggie Fox.  And the problem in aquaculture is similar to the problem in intensive farming everywhere. Farmers use antibiotics as insurance. “There are so many fish packed in such a small space that there would be a big loss for the fish farmer is he or she loses production so the use is mostly preventive,” he says. “If you have conditions where animals are packed all together—look at this from the perspective of a pathogen.”

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In this episode, Dr. Hsu Li Yang chats with our host Maggie Fox about how Singapore managed the COVID-19 pandemic.

Singapore is a small country in Southeast Asia, but its experience with the first outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus – SARS – in 2003 and 2004 helped prepare leaders there for SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. Dr. Hsu Li Yang, Vice Dean for Global Health and program leader of infectious diseases at the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, lived through the first SARS outbreak and helped fight COVID-19.

While restrictions were tight, Dr. Hsu says they worked – and people saw they worked. “Trust currently has never been higher because people could see the success of how the pandemic was managed,” he tells us. What else worked in Singapore?

Dr. Hsu Li Yang is an infectious diseases physician who is currently Vice Dean of Global Health at Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also Associate Director of the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, a Research Centre of Excellence on biofilms and microbial communities based jointly at Nanyang Technological University and NUS. Although he has been involved in COVID-19 research and education, his primary academic focus is in the area of antimicrobial resistance. He has worked with famed comic book artist Sonny Liew to publish educational comics on both COVID-19 and antimicrobial resistance.  

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In this episode, our guests, Dr. Joakim Larsson and Dr. Amy Kirby, chat with our host, Maggie Fox, about the use of wastewater to detect known and unknown pathogens.

What have we learned from tracking COVID-19 in wastewater?  How can we use wastewater surveillance for monitoring antimicrobial resistance (AMR)? Could we someday detect and stop the next pandemic by sifting through sewage? Let's find out!

Dr. Joakim Larsson is a Professor in Environmental Pharmacology at the Department of Infectious Diseases, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and the director of the multidisciplinary Centre for Antibiotic Resistance Research (CARe).

Dr. Amy Kirby is an Environmental Microbiologist in the Waterborne Disease Prevention Branch and the Program Lead for the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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In this episode, our guest, Dr. Bethany Young Holt, chats with our host, Maggie Fox, about products that combine contraceptives with sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention, Multipurpose Prevention Technologies (MPTs), for women.

Do women get STIs as often as men?  Why do women need MPTs?  Aren't condoms enough?  What do these technologies look like? Let’s find out!