LSM technologist tells you some insights on One Health! Visit https://www.facebook.com/lsmlab for the broadcast!

What is One Health?

The main concept of One Health is to develop strategies on disease detection and prevention. This requires coordination of specialist such as physicians, veterinarian, food safety specialist, environmental biologist, microbiology laboratory as well as all of you! In the past healtcare system is more or less concentrated on disease treatment rather than disease prevention. One Health brings the concept of disease prevention and detection helping to lower healthcare burden and to bring us a more sustainable healthier life.

Why is One Health important? 

As we can see that many diseases in the last decades or so are those we called 'emerging disease' which means a disease that had not been found on human before. Examples include SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012, to name a few. Both disease caused heavy social impact and burden on healthcare system, economic and general social life. What is more is that we learned that both diseases were originated from animal - SARS from bat and MERS from camel. According to statistics, over 60% of the emerging diseases were originated from animal, while over 70% of these were spread from wildlife. One Health concept brings together specialist on human, animal and the environment and the works with microbiology laboratory to build up strategies to minimize further episode of such emerging diseases. Prevent them from happening can reduce burden to the society and to improve quality of life.

Who is invloved in One Health?

You of course! Apart from the specialists mentioned above, we need you as one of the main input. Prevent to get sick, prevent from spreading of germs are the most important thing to stop the consequence of a disease episode. If one get sick and spread the disease maybe during travel as what's SARS happening, the consequence is an outbreak of an emerging if the disease is one of which.

Where do infective agents come from?

Everywhere around us! Food animal is one of the source that we constantly get contact to. Not only saying the living one that possess threads to farmers but the meat that we buy from the market. Raw meat may contain bacteria of many kinds and can cause different health threads. Pathogens, if we are not heating the meat well enough to kill them, may make us sick lead to food poisoning.  In case the animal is carrying antibiotic resistance bacteria, such bacteria may transmit to us if, again, we are not cooking the meat well enough to get rid of them. Pets are source of oppurtunistic pathogens and those pathogens can infect us when we are somehow weakened. Wildlife, needless to say, is a huge reservoir of a large variety of infective agents. SARS, MERS to name a few, are all from wildlife. By understanding where are the sources of infective agents, we can easily protect ourselves from getting infection by practising good personal hygiene as well as food hygiene. 

Conclusion:

Work together! Physicians, veterinarian, food safety specialist, environmental biologist, scientist, microbiology laboratory, and you! Only to gather all our effort can One Health be successful.