 You might be wondering why a veterinarian is speaking on global pandemic threats in human. And that's a fair enough question, right? And certainly when I was a young child growing up dreaming of saving all the different species around the world, I never thought that I would be so involved in saving or providing health care to the human species. So thank you for joining me for inviting me in to help care for all of us. As the director of the global health team, but also as the previous director of health at the National Zoo, our team has had the privilege and the honor to travel around the globe and provide health care to many, many endangered species. From here in China to the giant pandas to cheetahs in Namibia in Kenya and gorillas in Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo. We've had an opportunity to provide or to help take care of many of these different species. Generally when I come home from a trip, everybody wants to hear about our work and hear about the species that we've worked on on the other side of the globe and seemingly so far away and not connected to our own lives and our own population. And although it's really fun to be able to share this with everybody, one of the things I try and stress is we really are connected. We're a lot more connected than we think as a species. We share the same globe, obviously. We share the same environment, water. But we also share some things that we would just assume not share. Things like emerging infectious diseases and viruses. Viruses being one of the types of diseases that we can get from animals. 75% of emerging infectious diseases come from the wildlife population first and then go into humans. Things like SARS, Ebola, Nipah virus. All these things first come from the wildlife population and move into humans. Partly in response to this is Smithsonian created our global health program. The underpinnings of this program is the concept of one health. Have many people heard the term one health before? Alright, so not a strong showing of hands. So the idea of one health is that there's really a continuum of species and humans being one of them. And if you're trying to look at the health of a species, they're really all so interrelated. And for many years, human medicine and veterinary medicine almost seem to track side by side doing some of the similar work but not really connecting or interdigitating well with each other. And the time has come now where we need to stop that. If we're trying to get ahead of the next emerging pandemic threat and stop it before it happens, the time really is now. And this is the whole idea of one health, trying to figure out how we can all work together and save all species, endangered animals and humans. So over the last five years, we've learned a lot about some of the things, some of the risk factors for emergence of the next pandemic. We've learned that there are many things that humans can do to put them in contact or at higher risk for coming infected. We've learned that there are particular risk areas, high risk interfaces, and that's typically where there's a high human population, high biodiversity. And some of the things that we can do that put us at risk are things like this, where we have clear cutting of forests, where we have bats, primates and rodents sold at market places, and also bushmeat hunting. So those are just some of the high risk behaviors that we do that can put us at a harm's risk. And so if we want to get ahead of that and start developing those strategies for those risks, to prevent those risks, or at least decrease them, part of the idea would be to develop an understanding of that which is in the wildlife population now before it shows up in humans. We have a strategy in the past where we have a number of humans dying like in Ebola, then we start looking there and try and figure out what the pathogen is, and then after that from what's the reservoir species, and then from there trying to elucidate the pattern or the method by which it cross species. By the time we get there, we've lost countless human lives, really just too much, it's not acceptable anymore when we have other options. Some of those other options would be to conduct the wildlife surveillance in populations ahead of time to get an idea of what viruses are there, and then evaluate these viruses, determine which viral families are the most likely to cause a problem, and then also to look at the strategies to develop interventions. Some of the interventions that we've worked on through not only our global health program at Smithsonian, but through a USAID funded program, Merging Pandemic Threats Program, we teach wildlife surveillance skills in countries that are considered in hot zones. Monitors have determined which countries have a high, you know, increasing human population and high-risk interfaces with wildlife. We also build laboratory capacity, so with the idea that the wildlife veterans with which we work are not only getting the samples, but bringing it to a laboratory, and then those laboratories are evaluating which viruses are already present in the animal population, again with the idea of if and when a chance amidst the human population will work a couple of steps ahead of time. An example of something that our team is working on right now is in Myanmar. So Myanmar is incredibly beautiful. The tourist population, the tourist visitation is really skyrocketing. In all cases, we work with a local team within the country, a country coordinator who is in charge of helping assess the risk and the different interfaces within that country. It's not our goal at all for us to show up and do the work, but to work with people who are in their own country, and we can help provide some of the training and the capacity building, but then get out of the way. In Myanmar, we have many different sites. This site in particular is a site of a beautiful bat cave. Some of these bat caves are also where people come to worship. So already, you're having a situation where you're putting people in increasing contact with animals, bats, and bats we already know harbor a lot of the viruses that could be easily transmitted to humans. In addition to these beautiful temples, it's all since they're so gorgeous, it's also a place where tourists are very likely to come. So we have a large influx into this arena already, but we'd like to have an idea of what it is that the bats have. So this is our team. One of the other goals is to make sure that when we're collecting samples, we're collecting samples safely. We're also in the process of developing systems where we can collect these samples non-invasively. We do indeed catch bats, primates, and rodents, so we can get those biological samples. But we've also discovered that some of the viruses that are present in bat guano can be figured out very quickly if you collect the samples on time. So here is our team training some of our Burmese colleagues on bat sample collection. As wildlife therapy, we are trained to collect samples and to nestetize and handle pretty much every species, from a flamingo to an elephant to a bat to a gorilla. So it's really useful and it's very rewarding to be able to do that, but we also, one of the things that's very important for us is for us to keep the local population in mind because it's really the humans here that we're trying to save. For me, this really underscores the reason that DVMs and MDs can work together so well because it's the same needle, syringe, laboratory, blood tube, whether you're anesthetizing an animal to care for humans or whether you're anesthetizing an animal to care for wildlife. This is our team in Kenya working with the same group that we work with for human disease surveillance, and they're working to save an endangered black rhino. This black rhino has a novel disease and so we're working with the government of Kenya as well as some NGOs. And here's a picture of both myself and the head veterinarian there. He's also the one who's one of the country coordinators that's helping us work with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Livestock within Kenya. The point of all of this for me, again, is that, and the One Health concept is that we're all very connected to each other, and if we want to stop the next pandemic, it's really not going to work for us, and we're not going to be very efficient if we look at humans or any species in isolation of the environment or other species. So as much as possible, we try and make sure that we're training locally, that we look at all species at the same time. The other part, and I think it's really important too for us, is that the idea that with such great opportunity comes great responsibility. We all have the opportunity to work together, governments, pharmaceutical companies, veterinarians, physicians, and the time really is now. I don't think we can't get to the point where we have another Ebola or another SARS or another HIV. If we have these systems in place for rapid surveillance and rapid interventional responses, we could be saving so many lives.