One Health Movement News / One Health Topics 'in' the News

Excerpt: "Southeast Asia is recognized as a hotspot for new viruses—it’s where virus hunters go to figure out what to put in next year’s flu vaccines. O’Leary says that Vietnam’s large population of domestic ducks, chickens, and pigs makes the country particularly vulnerable. “There’s a lot of potential contact with human populations,” he says. And then there’s the continued impact of human activity on forests. “The forests have been extensively logged, and so the opportunities for wildlife, for instance, to come into contact with domestic animals and into contact with humans are great,” he says.

Public health leaders in Vietnam are well aware that the country is a breeding ground for new diseases. And they’re sold on One Health, both for Vietnam itself and for global health security. “Diseases used to be enclosed in certain regions or countries,” says Dr. Tran Dac Phu, head of the Ministry of Health’s Preventive Health Department. “Now globalization has made them easier to spread.” In 2003, Vietnam was the second country to report a case of SARS, a disease that whipped up waves of panic as it threatened to spread around the world. It was also the first country to contain the outbreak."

Excerpt:

More than 1 million people contract a tropical disease known as leptospirosis each year, resulting in nearly 59,000 deaths, a new study shows.

That worldwide estimate of the impact of the illness, which typically affects underdeveloped areas in Latin America, Africa, Asia and island nations, is far greater than previously thought, the Yale School of Public Health researchers noted.

"The study identified an important health burden caused by this life-threatening disease, which has been long neglected because it occurs in the poorest segments of the world's population," study leader Albert Ko, chair of the department of epidemiology of microbial disease at Yale, said in a news release from the New Haven, Conn.-based university.

"At present, there are no effective control measures for leptospirosis. The study provides national and international decision makers with the evidence to invest in initiatives aimed at preventing the disease, such as development of new vaccines," Ko added.

Spirochetal bacteria, which is found in the urine of rats and other mammals, causes leptospirosis. The germ can survive in soil and water, infecting people through cuts and scrapes on the skin. In developing countries, leptospirosis can lead to bleeding in the lungs and kidney failure.

BACKGROUND: Despite ongoing advances in biomedicine, infectious diseases remain a major threat to human health, economic sustainability, and wildlife conservation. This is in part a result of the challenges of controlling widespread or persistent infections that involve multiple hosts, vectors, and parasite species. Moreover, many contemporary disease threats involve interactions that manifest across nested scales of biological organization, from disease progression at the within-host level to emergence and spread at the regional level. For many such infections, complete eradication is unlikely to be successful, but a broader understanding of the community in which host-parasite interactions are embedded will facilitate more effective management. Recent advances in community ecology, including findings from traits-based approaches and metacommunity theory, offer the tools and concepts to address the complexities arising from multispecies, multiscale disease threats.

"Today the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) launched the U.S. Stakeholder Forum on Antimicrobial Resistance (S-FAR) and released the Forum’s foundational principles. More than 75 national organizations, representing medical and allied health professionals, hospitals and other healthcare facilities, patients and consumers, public health, research and advocacy, industry, and international health organizations have joined the partnership so far. Partners will convene for the inaugural S-FAR meeting in Philadelphia on Oct. 9, 2014."

The following article by the Veterinary Information Network (VIN) News Service profiles the ongoing Bartonella research being conducted by the Intracellular Pathogens Research Laboratory (IPRL) within the CVM Center for Comparative Medicine and Translational Research. Directed by Dr. Ed Breitschwerdt, the work of the IRPL is an example of the “One Medicine” concept and the importance of the connections between animal and human health and veterinary and human medicine.