Personal reflection

Steeven Toor
March 29th 2017

This weeks twitter question was concentrated on providing positive

examples of transdisciplinary one health disease prevention strategies in the
global south. The first discussion piece I came across was around the one
health central and eastern Africa (OCHEA) and how the organization is
empowering health workers through one health education. From here there
was a question from another peer if there were other sectors that OCHEA
worked in as only vet med and public health were mentioned and was said to
be the main forces behind the strategy. In response it was said that other
field collaboration on this included biology, veterinary medicine,
environmental workers and doctors etc. and there were other people in
collaboration as well including the Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania and
Uganda. From another peers tweet I found a statistic that they posted quite
interesting, they had posted that 99% of rabies deaths globally occur in
Africa and Asia. This was brought up because of a animal health initiative
being implemented in Tanzania and Bhutan that eliminates rabies in vaccines
to eliminate exposure and infection in humans and so far has been
successful. This initiative touches on the global health principles of shared
benefits. Not only are we helping improve animal health by removing rabies,
but were improving human health as well. My personal tweet for this week
was along similar lines as well where I had tweeted about joint animal and
human vaccination campaigns taking place in Africa that were helping
increase overall human immunization rates. Again this remarks on the notion
that the health of animals and environment is very much connected to
humans and if we make the effort to ensure the environment and animals
are healthy, we can improve the overall wellbeing of humans, again
connecting to the global health principle of shared benefits. One of the most
liked tweet was on OneHealth initiative that took place in South Africa related
to zoonotic diseases and had collaboration between researchers, government
officials, veterinarians etc. and was on the centers for disease control and
prevention website. It was interesting to see in the actual article that they
listed out all of the stakeholders and there were actually quite a few
stakeholders involved in this initiative such as human and veterinary health
role players in South Africa. Some of them were the National Department of
Health (NDoH), Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF),
human and veterinary health institutes, academic researchers and public and
private clinicians and veterinarians from the US and South Africa as well as
international agencies. This particular One Health initiative depends on the
collaborative efforts of multiple disciplines and one of the core competencies
that is also required is knowledge translation. With so many organizations
working collectively, there is a need for the various disciplines to translate
their work to the other partners and stakeholders in a holistic manner. The
paper mentions that there is a focus on both research and surveillance, but
regardless of which one is being worked on, there is still a need for equitable
partnerships and knowledge translation that transfers knowledge coherently
that will then in turn inform effective disease surveillance or research. The
challenges with accomplishing this is linking the data, research and
surveillance across the public and private spheres in animal and human
health, promoting dialogue and joint surveillance between human and animal
health and improving the ability to detect emerging diseases and responding
to outbreaks. This example also touches on the global health principles of
inclusion and authentic partnering. I was thinking about these principles
because it occurred to me that if there was this level of collaboration going
on there needs to be an inclusive environment where knowledge was being
transferred between disciplines building authentic partnerships that are
focused on increasing animal and human health. This was also a positive
example of a transdisciplinary effort as it was incorporating some of these
global health principles and related back really well to the twitter question
for the week, which is why I thought it might have received the most amount
of likes.