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Beth Feingold, PhD, MPH, MESc, is the Pim Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Change in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at The Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in geography and health, particularly the impact of industrial food animal production, climate, land use change and city planning on public health. Her One Health talk focused on public health issues related to industrial food animal production. Dr. Feingold wanted us to take home 3 messages from her talk: 1) Industrial food animal production poses a number of threats to public health in the forms of air pollution, water pollution, environmental justice issues, emerging pathogens, and antibiotic resistant bacteria, 2) There are many challenges to quantifying the nature and magnitude of these effects, and to balancing risks, and 3) A One Health approach could help mitigate environmental, veterinary and human health risks posed by the food animal production system. Dr. Beth Feingold explains the One Health c...

Before he became the director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009, Dr. Jamie Bartram spent ten years at the World Health Organization coordinating water, sanitation, hygiene and health.  He has worked in about 40 developing and developed countries and describes himself as a “generalist” in water and health. Dr. Bartram began his lecture by asking the audience for estimates on how much disease could be prevented by better managing water, sanitation and hygiene.  Estimates ranged greatly, reaching as high as 90%.  Although the correct answer was that “almost one tenth of the global disease burden could be prevented by improving water supply, sanitation, hygiene and management of water resources," we later learned that this is most likely an underestimation.  Dr. Jamie Bartram, PhD (Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences & Engineering at UNC) discusses WaSH and One Health. Water risk factors comprise...

Dr. Tracey S. McNamara, DVM, DACVP (Professor of Pathology at Western University of Health Sciences College of Veterinary Medicine) presented a fascinating overview of the chronology of the response to the West Nile virus outbreak of 1999.  She highlighted the deficits present in our system of response, and brought to light the many yet-unanswered questions regarding how emerging zoonotic diseases are handled in the U.S.  A somewhat routine story of an emerging zoonotic disease outbreak took on new urgency and revealed conflicts when presented through the lens of the One Health concept. Click here to view this presentation. A graduate of the New York State College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University, Dr. McNamara was working as the Bronx Zoo’s senior zoo pathologist at the time of the West Nile virus outbreak.  She currently serves in leading a collaborative effort with Russian colleagues on the “Human-Animal Interface” project as part of the Nuclear Threat...