 going to get into One Health and it seems like ILRI has been working or ILRI scientists both in integrated and biosciences have been working on One Health for a very long time and we've got this opportunity to get everyone on board so with the way we're going to do this is I'm going to quickly bring our experts and we're going to ask them a bunch of questions and Michael confirmed that we can put our questions in the chat box and in the mentee so we can try and address some of these and I encourage everyone to try and go to the New Zoonotic Landing page which shows what we've been doing so Eric are you there I am good morning everyone so Eric we have the first question for you we're going to give you five minutes and I've got a couple of questions for you and we're going to start with what's the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic and why did WHO take so long to declare a pandemic okay so I guess I there are a few a few definitions that we should probably start with before we get to pandemic so okay so first is the term endemic which is important to know and an endemic disease is a disease which is found amongst a particular group of people or animals in a particular geographical area in a stable fashion and it comes from the Greek word endemos which means native and basically examples of this might be malaria in sub-Saharan Africa broadly speaking a disease called echinococcus in Turkana is endemic there the common cold is endemic globally and African swine fever is an endemic disease in Kenya then moved to a sort of slightly higher level definition which would be an epidemic which is somewhat more unstable than an endemic disease and it comes from the Greek upon the people and an endemic disease is a disease that's spreading amongst an unusually extensive group of people or of individuals in a population or in a community or through a whole region and so for example there might be an epidemic of African swine fever in China at the moment an epidemic of obesity in North America so it's not all infectious diseases an epidemic of malaria in in Mombasa during the rainy season or an epidemic of foot and mouth disease in in the UK in 2001 that would be another example so that's what an epidemic is and then a pandemic is simply an epidemic but at a much bigger scale and it comes again from the Greek pandemos which means belonging to all the people and really a pandemic is an epidemic that's occurring worldwide or over a very large area crossing international boundaries and affecting a very substantial population thanks Eric so Eric after you define these tell us why do you why do who takes so long to declare this to be a pandemic so there's a there's a degree of politics of course in that declaration process the first thing WHO did was declare COVID-19 as a public health emergency of international concern or or p heck and that basically says look this thing is spreading we need to watch it and we need to mobilize funding to potentially deal with with a problem that is growing and then declaring it as a pandemic essentially says it's out of control so going from epidemic up to pandemic you you have less and less control over what is happening and of course WHO is an organization that is managed by its member states and no member state wants to put across the fact that it's not got things under control and so there was some some degree of hesitation I think associated with the degree of control of transmission that was going on great um so Eric this isn't the first pandemic and we've had some previously which I'd just like you to give an example on and also just to share with those people who aren't sure about one health in terms of what are some of the lessons that we can learn from pandemics so there have been there have been several pandemics thankfully not lots there are animal pandemics and human pandemics so I would say that African swine fever is reaching pandemic levels on the edges of Russia and Europe because it's spreading in multiple countries potentially in an uncontrolled way although our African swine fever expert colleagues may wish to comment on that um H1N1 was declared a pandemic Zika virus was briefly a pandemic plague in Europe was certainly a pandemic Spanish flu in 1918 was definitely HIV was a pandemic so we may often forget that but there was a pandemic pandemic scale transmission of HIV in the late 80s and up to the early 1990s and some might say that blue tongue which is an animal disease also um so yes so you want to move on in the last minute you have maybe you can summarize how do we prevent future pandemics what are some of the things we need to do first of all we need to do surveillance a lot of surveillance and in the context of one health that means doing surveillance at interfaces between animals and people both wild animals and domestic animals and also accounting for the environmental envelope in which transmission has occurred but also addressing many of the root causes of of transmission at those interfaces particularly encroachment of environment into into new environments or poor management of complex interfaces which might be with virgin forest or might be the urban interface or it might be some interface between urbanization and wildlife habitats and that kind of thing so it's really about managing the way that we interact with the natural world thank you Eric thank you so much for that um can we have Delia hello Delia I wanted to find out um what for those people who who don't know about one health what is a one health approach and why does it matter yes well there are several definitions of one health but they all have something in common in fact I can say they all have three things in common firstly is the integration of the three healths human health animal health and ecosystem health and here I say integration because I think we're all used to different disciplines working in the same project but working in their own silo side by side and every year they meet up and they tell each other what they've done in one health this actually requires integration or closely working together another component another essential characteristic is its work at the intersection of the three healths so we often show these three healths as three circles like a like a Venn diagram and one health is where they come together so if you work on foot and mouth disease you may be indirectly helping human health um but if you work on rift valley fever you are very close to helping human health so we're talking about the intersection a third aspect is collaboration and adding value from collaboration again we've often seen that when we work across disciplines and one health requires not just working across health disciplines but also working across other disciplines such as environment ecology gender socioeconomics that working across disciplines can sometimes add transaction costs we say an approach is one health where it is adding value so the benefits of working together exceed the costs so that's how I would define one health okay and then Delia so then why does it affect all of us and in terms of what are some of the gaps that exist right now in one health well at the moment the world is living in the midst of four great one health crisis four four problems which arise at the intersection of these three healths and they are one of them we're talking about today which is emerging infectious diseases Eric has summarized I think all of us know about COVID-19 and we don't know about other other emerging infectious diseases but Eric drew our attention to some of the important ones of the last decades there's also the endemic we heard about the endemic the diseases we have always with us the endemic zoonoses which are diseases transmitted from animals to people and in fact if you look at the actual health impacts on poor people those of the endemic zoonosis like pork tapeworm or some of the foodborne diseases are probably greater the third crisis that takes me to the third crisis which is food safety food safety comes from agriculture often makes animals ill and definitely makes humans ill and that that is another one health problem and finally antimicrobial resistance where the the three quarters of the world's antimicrobials are used in animals and yet a huge human health impact is already with us by 2050 AM our resistant pathogens may be killing more people than cancer unless we start taking stronger action including our action in agriculture thank you um should we be worried about getting COVID from livestock companion pets and should we be worried about consuming animal source food if infected with COVID so there have been a very few cases across the world of COVID being detected in cats large and small and one dog um many of the lead organization European food food safety CDC um World Health Organization have looked very carefully at these two questions you've asked and their conclusion is unanimous there is no at present there is no need to be concerned about acquiring COVID-19 from either animals pets or food so that is at least one thing we don't need to worry about great and in the last minute that you have um can you share what or actually you have a couple of minutes uh what are some of the myths that we should uh what are some of the myths around um one health and pandemics and what should we what should we be really concerned about well we've mentioned one of the the main myths and that is that food or animals may now be having a role in transmission um so so that's an important one not to worry about I think a potentially dangerous myth is that home cures uh can be effective and that we can rely on them another myth is that we can just rely on on on single actions like masks we know now we should all be wearing masks but wearing a mask is not enough to protect you you also need to observe social distancing good hygiene wash hands frequently and all the other advice there's many myths around I don't have time to go through them all but there's also many sources of good information including the ctc website the world health organization and the ministry of health in Kenya so I would encourage you all to google those and and and get bring yourself up to date on on COVID in terms of what we should really be concerned about well I think there are two major concerns one is that nearly all the the sickness and death has occurred in quite a small group of people and those are elderly people with other health problems so those are the people who are most at risk and those are the people we need to make sure are isolated and are kept as safe as possible my other concern and that's especially in Kenya and other low and middle income countries is that the impacts of attempting to control this this this this truly serious pandemic can in themselves have many many serious impacts in terms especially of people's access to food to work to livelihoods and how we can manage that trade-off to bring the disease under control without causing too much damage to livelihoods and economies and that's I think that's it from my side thank you actor thank you Delia thank you so much for this next session I would like to have Christina, Bernard, Ashley and Hung available I wanted to start with Christina we know that we've been doing quite a bit of stuff and Christina could you please share what we're doing here at Ilri with respect to One Health yes hi actor greetings from Germany well what I wanted to talk about is our new One Health Center at Ilri just before COVID-19 took off in China the German government allocated 8 million euros for a period of five years to build up a One Health Center at Ilri and the purpose of that One Health Center is not to reinvent the wheel it's more about consolidating all these One Health efforts that we have already included in our research at Ilri over the past two decades or so so this One Health Center is going to be some kind of umbrella for all the One Health work that is going on at Ilri we are trying to consolidate that research we want to complement it by for example better integrating with our environmental health colleagues and socioeconomics and we are attempting to scale activities that could be a training of frontline One Health practitioners in our various project countries it could be reaching out to policymakers by better science communication and therefore influencing their decision-making and as I said initially we're not going to reinvent the wheel we're building on what's already done in urban zoo in hill in the in the horn program in the build program and many others and the core traumatic areas of the One Health Center food safety zoonotic diseases and antimicrobial resistance so over thank you so much Christina and Christina in terms of the One Health Center itself can you share just a little bit about sort of activities that we plan to do because there's quite a few popping up everywhere so what would be unique about the one that we have based at our place well I think unique is that we are going to reach out to not only the Ilri internal One Health activities but also to others right now we're setting up some kind of yellow pages One Health activities directory by mapping One Health initiatives across sub-Saharan Africa which will be the geographical focus of the One Health Center at first and we actually I think the novelty is to actually give that platform and forum to discuss and then actually get things into action because what happens in research we have our little three to five year projects and then we just move on we don't work with the results we don't build on what we have learned we don't communicate with other research projects so I think that One Health Center can give this platform to yeah to take research into use thank you thank you so much Christina Bernard are you online yes actor thank you Bernard I know you've been doing some really exciting things and I'm always excited to talk about them but I'll let you tell everybody what you've been doing and also what else are we doing beyond your work on in the One Health space okay thanks I think the previous speakers actually alluded to some of the things we do and I would maybe mention a few because I think there's a lot large portfolio of research we do on One Health so the first would be the emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases which Eric actually leads and here we do lots of work looking at transmission patterns of diseases between livestock humans and wildlife so this has lots of partnerships between the veterinary community the human health community and also the environmental community and maybe you have heard of many projects which fit there like the zoo link the the horn the hill project you know all those really helped to address this specific problem of how diseases jump between livestock humans and wildlife so that's one the second other body of research is on what we call diseases in agricultural landscapes and this tries to look at how land use change and environmental change enhances or precipitates diseases to occur and so you've heard of things like irrigation being an intensive form of agriculture which helps to develop mosquitoes and so transmit vector bone diseases you have heard of things like inversion into forests and diseases coming out and that's a few years ago we had Ebola research in Uganda which really gave us a very good risk map of where we think Ebola could be and it was done by a colleague from Australia the other portion of work which we have been doing a lot is climate change and rift valley fever and that really helps in developing risk maps for diseases and that's what policy makers usually like using for planning surveillance what Eric was talking about surveillance between human and and and and livestock interface so that's the second the third which I briefly mentioned is food safety and that's what delia mentioned and it really has lots of one health approaches because there we are looking at using market interventions to enhance food safety and this is where people like Sylvia is doing lots of work on more milk projects to look at how we can build capacity along food value chains to reduce on on food safety issues there's lots of work on the flatoxins lots of work on food safety work in Tanzania and and so there's lots of all these things happening at the same time but in general I think they use one framework looking at one health across animals humans and wildlife thank you thank you so much Bernad Arshni are you there yes I am and actually what I wanted to do was to know I'm not able to share my screen so you don't get to see a very pretty picture of AMR and why is AMR a one health issue I can share that at another time so basically as Delia pointed out with AMR highlighting the gravity of the issue of AMR on animal and human health and really with AMR or antimicrobial resistance it arises in humans animals and the environment and these ecological niches are so interconnected or interrelated with each other so you have this beautiful transfer of AMR between the different niches and therefore if you really want to have an impact on addressing AMR you need a multi-sectorial approach so interventions in all the different sectors in order then to reduce AMR ultimately or the burden of AMR in animal in human health and at the AMR hub what we're doing is that there are a number of projects trying to produce very valuable data to or evidence to show the the agricultural contribution of AMR in life in sorry low and middle income countries and this is incredibly important because in high income countries like in Europe and America we have a lot of data showing or highlighting agricultural risks so what we are trying to do is to produce this data so that ultimately we will inform interventions that will eventually reduce AMR in the different sectors and then eventually reduce AMR in humans. So actually just one more question for you you know everywhere AMR doesn't have a face you can't see it you can't come and say I'm a recovery of AMR so how does that play in into this one whole one health where can you find it in these different systems that Delia made reference to? That's the difficulty because they is like you said you can't really there's no face of AMR and it's why it's also been dubbed as the silent pandemic and really where it is is that when you look at the number of people that are dying from AMR or the animals that lost in productivity animal productivity and that's you kind of see the effects of it of AMR and not AMR per se unless you are a microbiologist working in the lab then you could see it. Sure thank you so much Arshani thanks so much for that. Whom can you please tell us what you guys are doing in Asia as far as one health is concerned? Okay hello everyone you know I don't want to compare the quantity of work on one health from Asia to Africa because we have much less work here so that's why I want to come back a little bit in the history that when we started one health or rather eco health that Delia mentioned from the beginning 10 years ago in Southeast Asia basically building the capacity of one health in eco health for local partners here and now the ongoing work on one health in India in Southeast Asia focus on two areas one is more research and the second one I would say capacity and policy translation and in research we map into three things zoonotic disease and infection disease so with that we work on various nucleotide diseases in pets, rabies, dengue, we have also food safety and actually food safety is main work here in Vietnam and Cambodia and lastly the AMR work that has been started recently so we have various small pieces of work I would say and we try to translate it in capacity and policy and for that we work on three things we've been up some of the eco health or one health resource centers in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia so we have three and we we try to continue and the second one we develop a policy task force and mainly on food safety at the moment to work more with national and and policy medical level to translate some of these things into copies thank you thank you Hong thanks so much for that if I could just get everyone to still ask some questions or collect the questions you have before I moved to Ian Dieter and Jimmy and also just I know Bernard mentioned the HEAL project the horn project so just go to the Zoolink the Zoonosis website the new Zoonosis landing page to get some of that content out I'd like to see if Ian's online Ian are you there yeah hi Ector Ian I wanted to find out what are some of the opportunities that we have in one health and what are some of the gaps that that that you foresee okay thanks Ector so I think you know it is really well placed Delia has mentioned some of the areas that it is working on zoonotic diseases both the endemic and and the emerging diseases food safety AMR and so on and you know we have a lot of capacity and already to tackle those sorts of issues from a one health perspective and we're also fortunate as well as having the kind of those those technical areas of expertise that we've got within the same organization expertise on ecosystem health on climate change in particular on economics including economics of animal health trade and we've got one of the strongest gender teams in the CGI so I think there's a huge opportunity to bring to bear these different disciplines in a one health program I'm not sure we're really taking advantage of that interdisciplinarity that that Delia mentioned we've got to work harder to bring all those together but let me throw out a bigger vision I've got a bigger vision for this if you look at the challenges around one health there are technical issues but many of them are institutional and I was based in India I was asked to be part of the advisory committee of an initiative on zoonotic diseases led by the public health foundation of India and I said to them well why are you asking me I'm not a vet I'm not a medic I'm not an environmental scientist and the answer was that's exactly why we want you to be on the advisory committee because many of the challenges are institutional not necessarily technical and they were my role as being kind of independent of the three communities as it were was to help bring those communities together and help this program build those three communities together so I think we have an opportunity a huge opportunity to think about the institutional issues and I have a big vision for a truly one health center serving low and middle income countries that really bring these communities together a multi-institutional multinational organization bringing together ill-ray but bringing together strong public health partners strong environmental environment and environmental health initiatives and partners and Kenya would be a fantastic location for such a truly international center the new center for disease control in Africa is going to be based in Nairobi the Chinese government has pledged money to build it there are strong national potential partners in in in in Kenya so I think we should think big think about how could we really have a truly multi international a multi-institutional international one health center based here in Kenya with ill-ray being one member of that consortium let's think about that thanks Ekta Ian thank you so much that's really bold and ambitious and I like the way we're dreaming big hopefully we can make that happen line detail you there yes I'm there I think we have to keep in mind that there are more than 800 000 mammalian and virus birds bird viruses around and that pose a potential risk to humans that means pandemics come and go but they're coming and they will coming in a higher frequency as in the past and as you all know and to address health crisis a holistic approach and interdisciplinary cooperation including human health veterinary medicine but also environmental and social sciences needed it was saved before but if I look at our one health activities the two last ones so the social science and the environmental we have still again we are doing that a little bit of that but we have to intensify our activities in here and we are also asked by some of the donors how it really can include better experts from the human health site and you just remember Bill Gates when he said in February in any crisis leaders have two equally important responsibilities solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again and the second has the crucial long-term consequences and that should be also a focus in future of our one health initiatives we have there are many activities going on in very new technologies for point of care diagnostics rapid vaccine technologies so we are soon much better prepared to come up with new vaccines as we do today but very important but we also have to intensify in our current activities is the surveillance looking at symptoms because surveillance is one of the most important aspects of public health systems and survive this data drive our action and inform our decision and inform us of potential threats to the health of animals and humans and this should be linked to data management that's also an area where we currently are not good and they have to intensify so that's my view for the future of one health initiatives and for sure now is the best time to scale in this one health initiatives by widening the scope of our work and by extending regionally thank you sorry I have one more question for you do you feel like we're very you know when everyone thinks of a epidemic or a pandemic everyone comes to the science and looks at the bioscience do you believe that we as an institute are representing the integrated science more clearly in terms of climate change policies gender or do we need to do more on that over yeah absolutely that's what I say this is somehow a gap we're doing that but not in in a scope we should do it but there are ideas and there are first project proposals written so this is something you know using all the activities in ilry should support the one health centers or one health initiatives we have and then something we sometimes miss it including all the programs and not just working with one or two programs yeah all right thank you so much dita jimmy can we close with any sort of closing remarks in terms of what's the one message that we take away with one health and what does ilry's future look like going as a in one health thank you actor and thanks to all for those excellent contributions to this discussion I am encouraged by what everyone said it's an opportunity to take advantage of this crisis and to strengthen our work in this area and as ian said think big and bold I come to this based on my previous life I had to be leading the bank's work at the world bank's work when there was a real panic about avian influenza and what that could do to the world and there were some projections there that if we had a really serious pandemic the world's economy could contract by three percent well this is much bigger europe alone will contract by 15 so I have been on this issue of one health for some time because that was the recommendation the way to control pandemics was to deal with to have a one health approach we did lots of calculations about cost benefit 17 billion a year with returns of over 100 billion but even offered ways to fund it by taxing exports of meat and so on after the pandemic had passed no one bothered so we have to be waited until this opportunity and now we have an opportunity to represent the importance of this I was criticized at the time for we created a billion dollar fund at the bank for the pandemic preparedness and people criticized why were we focusing on pandemic why were you spending this amount of money on pandemics this is really for the developed world and so on now we see that pandemics is not only about rich people or rich countries in every facet of this crisis we're in the poor has suffered more lost their jobs first no markets to sell their produce we're going to do distance learning poor people don't have connectivity the poor have suffered so working in pandemics is not a loss to working on epidemics or diseases which are more common that we like malaria brucellosis and others like that so I am encouraged by what data said what Ian said and what all the speakers said about the opportunity to strengthen our work in one health and really become a serious player not only in the areas we've been working on the endemic diseases but diseases with pandemic potential as well the challenge there they tell me is surveillance how do you surveil for unknown things but we have smart people here and I know we can make a big contribution working with partners to how we might deal with the issue of trying to prevent future pandemics this is a good area for us to work on hopefully there will be some attention to come on this and we're well prepared we're well teed up as Ian said it's not just the technical aspects but the institutional aspects as well and we're in a good position to to do both and we have a strong foundation which have been built by Eric and Delia and Bernard and all whom and all of those who've spoken so thank you very much for this I hope Illry as a whole and of course our CG partners online have gotten a better understanding about what is one health what are pandemics how can we as a CGIR work to prevent and control them