One World, One Health

Send us Fan Mail Equity. The word brings up images of fairness and equality, and in Rwanda, it’s the law. On paper, at least, women are equal to men in Rwanda. Of course, like in so many other cases, the reality is a little different. But the Community One Health Empowerment in Rwanda (COHERS) project is working, one town, one community, and one village at a time to change that. COHERS is led by Veterinarians Without Borders North America (VWB) and implemented in Rwanda in partnership with th...

Send us Fan Mail The best thing about good science is that it never fails to surprise you. And the best problem solvers are always willing to be surprised. In 100 episodes of One World, One Health, we've been surprised over and over again by what people have learned as they have set out to solve some of the biggest problems facing the planet – and by how often what everyone thought was going to be the answer was not even close. The first episode of One World, One Health was posted on July 18,...

Send us Fan Mail Sometimes the best medicine is just listening. We’ve found this over and over again in this podcast – doctors, public health workers, ecologists and other people working in the One Health field struggle to solve some seemingly complicated problem, and then find it’s pretty straightforward when they stop and really listen to the people they’re trying to help. Whether it’s parents worried about vaccines harming their children; residents suspicious of foreigners who ...

Send us Fan Mail It’s a rare piece of good news. A single-dose dengue vaccine developed in Brazil as part of an international collaboration protected people against at least two strains of the virus for five years or longer, and did so safely. The vaccine was already being tested across Brazil and the findings helped boost confidence in its use. “This is a big deal,” says Dr. Andre Siqueira, Head of the Dengue Global Program at the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDI). &...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine a life form identical to your own, only backwards. At first, it would look normal. But just like when you try to use a mirror to read text on a page, it doesn’t quite translate. For some reason, all of the DNA of life on Earth is right-handed. The double helix of DNA that codes for all life on the planet spirals to the right – a quality called chirality. But, in theory, scientists could build cells based on DNA that spirals to the left. These mirror cells ...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine this scene: A family’s house was destroyed when it was bombed during a war. They got out with the clothes on their backs – nothing more. When they were fleeing, the mother was hit with fragments from another bomb. It tore off part of her leg. Dirt got in the wound. They made it to a refugee camp, but the wound got infected. With nothing available to treat the injury, the infection got worse. She had a drug-resistant infection that wasn’t treatable with regular antibio...

Send us Fan Mail Having a baby should be safe. Yet it’s far too often a death sentence for both the mother and the baby. An estimated 260,000 women died in 2023 during and right after giving birth, and those numbers will have risen with the loss of United States global aid dollars. There are ways to improve this – better prenatal care is an obvious one. According to the World Health Organization, women giving birth most often die from severe bleeding, infections, or other complications. Pregn...

Send us Fan Mail Fighting climate change can feel like a hopeless battle. Who can take on the giant fossil fuel companies when governments are not even bothering? How can countries act when every day temperatures rise, superstorms flood coastal areas, droughts devastate crops, and weather patterns bring insects and new diseases to areas previously spared? But there is something powerful and important that each and every resident of this planet can do to improve the health of the planet and at...

Send us Fan Mail A new report on health and climate change paints the grimmest picture yet about what’s going on – not just that 2024 was the hottest year on record, but evidence that many governments have stopped even pretending to try to do anything about it. The 2025 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change finds that more than half a million people die every year from heat-related causes, up 23 percent since the 1990s. Air pollution just from wildfire smoke was linked to 154,000...

Send us Fan Mail Of course, saving forests is good for the animals that live there and the environment. But saving forests where indigenous people live can have another surprising benefit. It can be good for the health of all of the people who live throughout the region, researchers have found. That benefit seems to come not just because forests are healthier ecosystems in general, but because indigenous people are good at taking care of them, a new study showed. Burning forests can cause hea...

Send us Fan Mail Bats can carry several viruses that can kills humans. Some well understood – rabies, the deadliest virus of all, is transmitted directly from bats to people from bat bites. Other viruses, such as Hendra virus, are a little more mysterious and indirect in how they spread. And researchers are still unsure how viruses such as Ebola, Marburg and the coronavirus that caused Covid-19 get from bats to people. However, a team working in the Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda may...

Send us Fan Mail Drug-resistant germs are hidden killers in more than one way. Not only are the microbes invisible to the human eye, in many places, they’re invisible because people simply are not looking for them systematically. Doctors often do not know what infections their patients have and treat them based on best guesses, which allows for ineffective treatments and exacerbates drug resistance. Policymakers don’t know which infections are most common among populations and cannot make inf...

Send us Fan Mail It’s a common scenario for a cancer patient. They’re undergoing treatment and get what’s known as a peripherally inserted central catheter or PICC (pronounced “pick”) line to make it more convenient to administer drugs. They are in and out of the hospital or just the clinic frequently to see various providers. The treatment they receive may run down their immune system a little bit. Just having cancer may have damaged their immune system. So then they get an infection. Perhap...

Send us Fan Mail It’s a really bad year for measles. Cases are spiking in countries where children should have been fully vaccinated, such as the United States, Canada, and Mexico. More than 1,000 cases have been reported in the United States just in the first half of 2025, with at least 3 deaths. The death of a child in Texas early in 2025 was the first time a child had died from the infection in the United States since 2003. It’s even worse in Canada, with more than 2,500 reported cases.&nb...

Send us Fan Mail Zombie movies may score at the box office and shows about dangerous contagions including “The Last of Us” may be a hit on streaming services, but preparedness for disasters is no winner for American politicians. Every recent U.S. presidential administration has dismantled the pandemic plan put together by the previous one, notes Dr. Asha M. George, Executive Director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. However, the cuts being made by the new Trump administration...

Send us Fan Mail The scene on the beach was horrific. Thousands of mothers and baby elephant seals lay in the sand, taken out by a deadly virus. Dr. Marcela Uhart and her colleagues were shocked by what they found after the H5N1 avian influenza virus swept through a colony of elephant seals on the coast of Argentina’s far south Patagonia region. More than 17,000 of the animals had died, their bodies ravaged by the virus. H5N1 bird flu has swept around the world, destroying poultry flocks and ...

Send us Fan Mail Plastic is everywhere. So are drug-resistant microbes. What happens when the two team up? A raft of new studies show that bacteria can grow well on plastics, especially on microplastics. Other studies show just how widespread microplastics are – they are found in every ocean and sea tested so far. The most startling studies show these tiny bits of plastics can also build up in the human body, including in the liver and brain. Science is done piece by piece, study by study, wi...

Send us Fan Mail It’s been a dire year for global health. Almost as soon as he took office as president of the United States, Donald Trump said he would withdraw the country from membership in the World Health Organization (WHO), he fired almost everyone at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and slashed staffing and budgets at U.S. health agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The United Stat...

Send us Fan Mail Air pollution is a big killer. Air pollution of all kinds helped kill 4.2 million people globally in 2019, according to the World Health Organization. It can damage nearly every organ in the body, worsening asthma and leading to cancer and heart disease. It especially affects pregnant women and can damage a growing fetus. Air pollution also has more insidious effects. Dr. Álvaro Hofflinger of Arizona State University and colleagues studied school children in a part of Chile w...

Send us Fan Mail It’s hard to overstate how popular writer John Green is. His most famous book, The Fault in Our Stars – a novel about teenagers with cancer, young love, and fate – has sold tens of millions of copies. The film based on the book brought in more than $300 million and it’s still popular to this day. Green has become a YouTube star and leader of online communities of fans including Nerdfighteria, as well as a co-host of an annual fundraiser for Project for Awesome. He's also...

Send us Fan Mail People have always doubted science. In the 17th century, Galileo was sentenced to house arrest by the Catholic Church for reporting his observations that the sun is at the center of the solar system and that the other planets, including Earth, orbit it. In 1925, the U.S. state of Tennessee banned the teaching of evolution and when a high school teacher named John Scopes agreed to challenge the law, the Scopes “monkey” trial resulted. People did not like to think that they des...

Send us Fan Mail Measles is an extremely infectious virus that can both kill and cripple children. Luckily, there are highly effective vaccines to prevent the disease. The World Health Organization recommends that 95 percent of the population be fully vaccinated against measles because it’s so contagious. This helps to ensure that vulnerable children and infants who cannot be vaccinated are protected. Yet vaccination rates are falling globally. The result? A 20 percent increase in measles cas...

Send us Fan Mail Governments and corporations are “undermining our future” by supporting fossil fuels in the face of overwhelming evidence that using coal, oil, and gas is killing people, a startling new report finds. The report, from the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, finds that in 2023 alone, more than double the number of people over 65 died from excessive heat compared to the 1990s. People living in every country around the world are now threatened by the effects of climat...

Send us Fan Mail Children under five years old are fragile. They’re more vulnerable than adults to malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, and other infections. A growing number of these infections that sicken and kill children are resistant to the drugs developed to treat them – a phenomenon known as antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. AMR is a big killer. Nearly five million deaths are caused in part by drug-resistant infections each year. While the percentage of children killed by these infections has...

Send us Fan Mail Smallpox may be gone but it’s got a cousin called mpox, and that virus is now spreading fast across parts of Africa. As of October 2024, this mpox outbreak had infected more than 40,000 people, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 1,000 people have died from the infection. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries to be a P...

Send us Fan Mail Farmers need land to grow their crops, and in many parts of the world, that means clearing forests. That’s especially true in the Amazon region in South America. Crops just won’t grow under the thick forest canopy, so a new banana plantation means clearing trees. This has all sorts of effects on the ecosystem and researchers are seeing a new one. A virus called Oropouche was identified back in the 1950s, but it was pretty rare. Like so many viruses, it causes headaches, body ...

Send us Fan Mail Most people don’t even think twice when they get an infection. Much of the time, the best treatment is simple: fluids and rest. Bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics – a quick course of pills, maybe a week or 10 days, and you’re done. But the rise of drug-resistant pathogens is changing that. These germs (viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi) have developed the ability to survive even the strongest of antimicrobial drugs. This phenomenon is known as antimicr...

Send us Fan Mail Rosemary Bartel had no idea her life was going to take a turn when she went to a hospital near her home in Chilton, Wisconsin in the United States for standard knee replacement surgery – her second such operation. She was ready to work hard to recover and return to her busy job at her Roman Catholic diocese. But Rosie developed an all-too-common infection known as MRSA—methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s one of the best-known examples of antimicrobial-resistant ...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Nour Shamas knows about antimicrobial resistance. As a clinical pharmacist, she was trained in how to dispense drugs to treat infections, and her graduate studies in global health policy made her aware of the threat of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. Antimicrobial resistance develops when bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites evolve the ability to shake off the effects of drugs developed to fight them. It’s one of the biggest threats to humanity – such a serious ...

Send us Fan Mail Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common, uncomfortable, and embarrassing. They can also be deadly. These infections of the kidneys, bladder, or urethra affect about 1 in 10 men in their lifetimes and more than half of women. Untreated UTIs can cause a body-wide infection known as sepsis. An estimated 236,000 people globally die every year from UTIs. Most UTIs are fairly easy to treat with antibiotics. However, a quarter to a third of urinary tract infections (UTIs) ...

Send us Fan Mail No one wants to be exposed to air pollution. No one wants to raise their kids breathing in polluted air in their own neighborhoods. But in Austin, Texas, people of color are disproportionately forced to do both. Dr. Sarah Chambliss, a research associate in the Department of Population Health at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, led a team that ran a study of who is being affected by air pollution in Austin, neighborhood by neighborhood. They found that...

Send us Fan Mail People don’t want to see any more pandemics, notes Nita Madhav, Senior Director of Epidemiology & Modeling at Ginkgo Biosecurity, the biosecurity and public health unit of Ginkgo Bioworks. The world is collectively traumatized by the horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic, Madhav says in this episode of One World, One Health. But just because we don’t want to see another pandemic doesn’t mean we won’t get one. The world isn’t doing enough to keep an eye out for the...

Send us Fan Mail Drug-resistant bacteria are major killers, playing a role in killing five million people a year. Antibiotics were miracle drugs when they were invented 100 years ago, but they are losing their power against always adapting and evolving bacteria. At the same time, the market for new antimicrobial drugs has collapsed. Hardly anyone wants to make new antibiotics, and even fewer companies want to make new diagnostic tests or vaccines for drug-resistant infections. Whi...

Send us Fan Mail An estimated 7.7 million people die from bacterial infections a year around the world. A growing number of these deaths are caused by bacteria that have developed antibiotic resistance – the ability to thrive in the face of antibiotics. This ability of germs to defy the effects of drugs is called antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. But why wait to treat these infections after they’ve happened? It’s far better to prevent them from happening in the first place. Dr. Jo...

Send us Fan Mail The problem of antimicrobial resistance – AMR for short – is clear. More and more of these germs resistant to existing treatments are emerging everywhere, and there’s little disagreement that governments, nonprofits, doctors, patients, and politicians all need to help tackle the problem. But people need to agree on what to do, and they need to agree on how to measure progress. That’s where targets come in. Aislinn Cook, a senior research fellow in infectious disease epidemiol...

Send us Fan Mail What kills more people than HIV or malaria? What threatens anybody on the planet – and not just people, but animals, too? It’s antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the formal name for drug-resistant superbugs. These include bacteria that defy the effects of antibiotics, viruses that thrive in the face of antiviral drugs, and fungi that are immune to antifungal treatments. Each year, an estimated 7.7 million deaths are caused by bacterial infections, and nearly 5 million of these d...

Send us Fan Mail The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was especially bad in India. Patients filled hospitals as the Delta variant swept the country in April of 2021. As many as 2,000 people died every day. Many died literally gasping for air. Although India is a major producer of medical oxygen, supplies ran out amid the unprecedented demand. And while some areas of the vast country had access to medical oxygen, there was no good system for transferring them to places with more need. It ...

Send us Fan Mail Vaccines save lives. There’s no doubt about this: childhood vaccination saves four million lives every year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Children worldwide get a long list of vaccines, but what about adults? A study by the Office of Health Economics (OHE), an independent research organization, took a look at the cost-effectiveness of four commonly given adult vaccines: the influenza vaccine, pneumococcal vaccines that protect against a batch of res...

Send us Fan Mail Bird flu – aka avian influenza – is doing what it does best yet again – surprising scientists, public health officials, farmers, and wildlife experts. It’s been spreading among dairy cattle in the United States, something that startles even long-term observers of the virus. The H5N1 strain of avian influenza was first noticed in the late 1990s and it immediately worried experts, who saw its potential to cause a pandemic. It infects many wild birds without causing them too muc...

Send us Fan Mail Coral reefs are literally the foundation for much of the life on Earth. These living cities are made up of animals –coral – which exist in symbiosis with algae. They are home to thousands of species of fish, as well as important to the lives of as many as a billion people who rely on their production of food, their protection of coastal areas, and their attraction for tourists. They’re ancient, too, and have survived for millions of years. But now coral reefs are under...

Send us Fan Mail From the moment people discovered how to use penicillin, the first antibiotic, resistance has been a problem. Bacteria may be small, but they are not simple organisms and they have been fighting for survival for billions of years. Many bacteria have developed the tools they need to evade the effects of antibiotic treatments, and they can trade these weapons with other bacteria as they swap genetic material. Bacterial infections aren’t new to humanity, and for more than two de...

Send us Fan Mail It’s hotter and wetter than usual in Brazil, and climate conditions are driving an early blast of a killer virus – dengue. The mosquito-borne virus is spreading earlier than ever before and affecting far more parts of the country than usual – and all at once. Dengue’s a nasty virus. It causes pain so severe that it’s sometimes called breakbone fever. Patients often feel nauseated, develop rashes, and vomit blood. The most severe cases can cause internal bleeding. There’s no s...

Send us Fan Mail Peggy Lillis wasn’t expecting trouble when her dentist prescribed antibiotics after she had a root canal in 2010. It was a standard, just-in-case treatment to prevent infections after the procedure. She also wasn’t worried when she developed diarrhea soon afterward. The kindergarten teacher assumed she’d caught a bug from one of her young students. But within just a few days, the previously healthy 56-year-old was dead – a victim of Clostridioides difficile or C. diff. Thes...

Send us Fan Mail There’s a virus that infects just about every adult. It’s passed by skin-to-skin contact – most often during sexual intercourse. It’s the human papillomavirus (HPV for short). It often doesn't show any symptoms, and at times the infection resolves on its own. It can cause warts, but more ominously, HPV is the single biggest cause of cervical cancer. It's also a factor in common cancers of the head and neck, as well as cancers of the anus and penis. It's th...

Send us Fan Mail The world acted as if the COVID-19 pandemic was a big surprise. However, just months before, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) had warned that the world was vulnerable to a pandemic of respiratory illness and needed to act quickly. Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, the former president of Croatia, says she felt frustrated and helpless when the pandemic took hold in early 2020. She had just left office and felt powerless as she watched global failure after global f...

Send us Fan Mail Drug-resistant infections are a problem for everyone, but especially for newborns. They don’t have fully developed immune systems, and their bodies are less equipped to fight infections. The risk is highest for infants born sick or prematurely. Bloodborne infections – sepsis – are one major threat to newborns. Sepsis can move quickly, overpowering the body and causing severe illness and even death within hours. Doctors don’t have time to test babies to see what’s infect...

Send us Fan Mail Air pollution is a big killer, a culprit in 6.7 million deaths a year. It’s also depressing to live in a polluted area, and not simply for aesthetic reasons. Many people don't even know they are being exposed to some types of invisible air pollution. A team of researchers in California recently linked air pollution to depression during and after pregnancy. That’s dangerous to both mothers and their babies, explains Dr. Jun Wu, the team's principal investigator and a Professor...

Send us Fan Mail While innovative and effective ideas to help solve major global health problems are hard to come by, finding and attaining funding to put them into action can be even more difficult. The research grant review process takes time and can be bogged down in red tape. Decisions on who and what kind of research gets funded can pass over novel ideas in favor of familiar project plans. The Trinity Challenge aims to shake things up a bit by rewarding creative and practical ideas that ...

Send us Fan Mail In Gaza, thousands have been killed, tens of thousands injured, and hundreds of thousands more are without shelter, clean water, or medical care. “You have these horrible, horrible scenes playing out in many places,” says Avril Benoit, executive director of Medecins Sans Frontieres-USA, also known as MSF or Doctors Without Borders in English. Humanitarian groups such as Doctors Without Borders have called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas so they can help i...

Send us Fan Mail It’s heartbreaking when a drought or flood causes crops in a region to fail, and children to go hungry. Kids can starve to death or endure social, economic, and health problems well into adulthood due to malnutrition. But what if there was a way to predict when these weather disasters are likely to happen, so governments, aid organizations, and residents could prepare? A team at the University of Chicago says people could already do this, using one of the best-kn...

Send us Fan Mail Who reminds an HIV-positive pregnant woman to take her vitamins and the drugs that will protect her baby from infection? Who explains to fearful parents that COVID-19 vaccines will protect them and their children from the disease? Who shows people how to wash their hands properly so they don’t spread germs to themselves and others? In many countries across the globe it’s community health workers like Margaret Odera of Nairobi, Kenya. Margaret, herse...

Send us Fan Mail Vaccines are lifesavers. Childhood vaccines save 4 million lives every year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And it turns out vaccines don’t just save lives by directly preventing disease. They can save lives by reducing the rise of drug-resistant pathogens (mostly bacteria and viruses). This is because people who are vaccinated are less likely to get sick and to get treated either appropriately or inappropriately with antibiotics and antiviral...

Send us Fan Mail Air – it’s our most basic need. It’s far more vital than water, food, or medicine. People can survive just minutes without its most important component: oxygen. But in much of the world, people struggling to breathe lack access to medical oxygen, a treatment that makes the difference between life and death. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the problem and made it exponentially worse. “I will never forget the images,” Leith Greenslade, coordinator of the Every B...

Send us Fan Mail Bird flu is terrifying. Although avian influenza only rarely infects people, when it does, it kills half or more of them. For the past 25 years, the number one avian influenza threat has been highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza. Like other influenza A viruses, it gets its name from the two important components of the virus – the hemagglutinin, or H designation, and the neuraminidase, or N. Less important than the name is what the virus has been doing. Tens of ...

Send us Fan Mail Drug-defying superbugs can be found in manure, soil, the ocean, and especially in sewers. These places are sources of infection, but they also provide a way to keep an eye on which drug-resistant germs are where – and how much they are changing. The World Health Organization encourages mapping all of the places drug-resistant organisms are popping up, and what kind of organisms there are. “If no action is taken, AMR (antimicrobial resistance) could cost the world’s eco...

Send us Fan Mail Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are very, very common. One million people get infected with an STI every day, according to the World Health Organization. Many are easy to treat with antibiotics, or should be. These include gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydia. Like nearly all bacterial infections, they can and have begun to evolve resistance to antibiotics. The threat: these infections may again become untreatable, as they were in the days before antibiotics. Sex workers...

Send us Fan Mail Malaria is an ancient killer and it’s one that keeps outwitting humanity at every turn. It took centuries for people to figure out it was spread by mosquitoes. It evolved resistance to the drugs used to treat it and we developed new ones. It’s made comebacks thanks to climate change in places that got rid of the disease before by cleaning out mosquitoes. And now, the parasites that cause malaria have evolved resistance to the newest treatments – drugs based on artemisin...

Send us Fan Mail When the so-called Spanish Influenza started spreading in 1918, people locked themselves in their homes or even into small towns and tried to ride it out. It seemed to make sense – travelers could bring the virus with them, so wouldn’t keeping them out keep the deadly germ out, too? It did not work, of course. No one could stay isolated for years on end while the virus and its descendants made its way through the population. People are still getting infected today by a distan...

Send us Fan Mail Meat is never cheap – not in terms of the cost of raising animals for meat, or in terms of the impact on the environment. And now science has clearly shown that the way people use antibiotics in their flocks and herds can feed the rise of antimicrobial resistance. But antibiotics are so very useful, and in many countries, they are just “part of the furniture,” says Clare Chandler, PhD, a medical anthropologist who leads the Anthropology of Antimicrobial Resistance resea...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Henry Skinner thought he had a winning new antibiotic – perhaps even more than one – when he was CEO of a small biotech company called SelectX Pharmaceuticals. But like so many other companies working to develop new antimicrobial drugs, it went bust. Skinner learned a fair bit from that experience. Many people working in antibiotics become “gun-shy,” he says, or simply get burned out. But he’s taken those hard lessons and is using them as CEO of the AMR Action Fund. AMR s...

Send us Fan Mail Humans developed antibiotics in the 20th century. These wonder drugs defeat killer microbes and have revolutionized medicine, making surgeries and treatments like chemotherapy much safer. Unfortunately, people are overusing and misusing antibiotics, helping bacteria learn how to defend themselves against these lifesaving drugs. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the top 10 global health threats. Drug-resistant microbes directly killed nearly 1.3 million people in 2019 –...

Send us Fan Mail Drug-resistant germs are big killers. The World Health Organization estimates that infections caused by drug-resistant microbes help kill close to five million people a year, a number that’s expected to grow. The world needs new antibiotics, but bacteria are outwitting scientists and drug developers at every turn. Microbes can produce complex molecules, such as antibiotics, to protect themselves from other organisms. And they naturally develop survival mechanis...

Send us Fan Mail When COVID-19 started spreading around the world, many groups of indigenous people knew just what to do. They retreated into the forests they knew so well, an isolation practice that had helped their forebears survive countless other outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. But their survival skills didn’t stop there. Away from modern methods of food production, they turned to their knowledge of local, traditional foods to stay comfortable and healthy. Dr. Carol Zavaleta-Cortij...

Send us Fan Mail Few diseases are as fast-moving and as horrific as cholera. Fiction may focus on the internal bleeding caused by Ebola, while movie scripts about zombie apocalypses pull from what’s known about rabies. But cholera can infect someone in the morning and kill them by the evening. It can carry off a child before a parent can even register the little one is suffering from more than a run-of-the-mill tummy bug. Worse still, the diarrhea and vomiting caused by the infection carry th...

Send us Fan Mail Fungi can be our friends. They’re responsible, after all, for some of our favorite foods and drinks, including beer, bread, wine, and cheese. Penicillin, the parent of all antibiotics, comes from the fungal family as well. But fungi can also cause disease in humans, animals, and plants. In this episode of One World, One Health, Dr. Ana Alastruey-Izquierdo, a research scientist at the Mycology Reference Laboratory of Spain head of the mold unit, explains how fungal disea...

Send us Fan Mail So many people are working to improve health around the world. But many of these efforts tend to go in one direction – people in wealthy countries traveling to lower-income countries with resources and ideas. Yet people everywhere have great ideas. It’s a shame not to make use of them. And in making good use of locally generated ideas, efforts to improve health naturally become fairer and more equitable. In this episode of One World, One Health, we caught up with two people...

Send us Fan Mail Be prepared. It’s a great credo for parenting, camping, or, perhaps most important, an emergency. The world seemed ill-prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, but in reality, experts had extensive plans in place. They just did not get put into action. One of the planners was Dr. Jesse Goodman, an infectious diseases physician who has held leadership positions at the US Food and Drug Administration and who helped advise the White House. Now the director of the Center...

Send us Fan Mail Hindsight is 20-20 – it’s an old saying and never more true than when looking back at an epidemic. But sometimes looking backward can help people think more clearly when planning ahead. Dr. Sabine Franklin, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University, is an economist using her training to better understand public health. She went to west Africa to talk to people about the Ebola epidemic (2014-2016) that killed 11,000 people, most of them in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierr...

Send us Fan Mail When Ebola virus was first spotted in west Africa at the end of 2013, few people were ready. The region had no developed or systematic health system, patients were scattered across remote rural areas, and other infections, such as malaria, were common and mimicked the early symptoms. But a team in remote Kenema, in Sierra Leone, had been working to fight a different virus – Lassa Fever. They had set up a clinic with diagnostic testing and communications with the outside world...

Send us Fan Mail Antibiotics are lifesavers. These 20th-century drugs can save lives within hours, often given as just a handful of pills or an injection. But the germs they fight often fight back and evolve quickly. They develop what’s known as antimicrobial resistance, and then the drugs people use to treat infections become worthless. This happens naturally, but people and the way we behave often help it develop faster. When people use drugs when they don’t need them, or take...

Send us Fan Mail Drug-resistant superbugs are killers, and the problem is getting worse even as people become aware of the need to control how we use antibiotics. Researchers estimate close to five million people died in 2019 because of antibiotic-resistant bacteria alone. Yet, doctors continue to overprescribe these lifesaving drugs and farmers continue to give them to livestock and fish not only to treat and prevent disease but to help them grow faster. Now, a team of experts has shown cl...

Send us Fan Mail It was a real mystery. People showing up at hospitals and clinics across the US were infected with a rare and troubling strain of bacteria that was resistant to most of the drugs used to treat it. The strain itself had never been seen before. It was Pseudomonas aeruginosa, itself nothing rare. But this one carried a genetic change that allowed it to shake off the effects of even the strongest antibiotics usually used to treat it. Where had it come from? It took ...

Send us Fan Mail A walk in the woods can bring serenity and peace of mind. You can bring back souvenirs such as a beautiful leaf, or a pine cone. Sometimes your souvenir is less lovely - a tick. Dogs, cats, and even horses can suffer from tick bites and responsible pet owners regularly check their companions for these unwelcome parasites. Ticks can carry and transmit bacteria, viruses, and parasites that cause Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, Powassan virus, babesiosis, and erlichiosis. Climate ...

Send us Fan Mail Consumption. The White Plague. Scrofula. Tuberculosis (TB) has been known by so many names over the ages, and those names reflect just how long it’s been around and just how misunderstood it’s been. It’s killed kings and generals, playwrights, and poets. TB still sickens 10 million people every year and kills 1.5 million – even though it’s easily prevented and can be treated. It’s unusual because it needs to be treated even if the person infected has no symptoms at all. And...

Send us Fan Mail Antimicrobial resistance – the emergence of new drug-resistant superbugs – is one of the top 10 global health threats, the World Health Organization says. More than 700,000 people die each year from infections caused by drug-resistant microorganisms – which not only include antibiotic-resistant bacteria but also viruses, fungi, and parasites that can escape the effects of drugs designed to kill them. Filmmaker Michael Wech illustrates the problem with a series of stories ab...

Send us Fan Mail It was 1994, and a new virus was killing racehorses in Australia. Then it killed a horse trainer who was caring for his charges. The virus, called Hendra after the Brisbane suburb where it first surfaced, is a relative of the measles virus. Hendra virus has been traced to large, furry bats known as flying foxes. While it doesn’t make the bats sick, they can spread it to animals such as horses, which can become very ill and die. And there’s an interesting twist. Researchers ...

Send us Fan Mail Three full years into the COVID-19 pandemic and the world still doesn’t have a firm answer about where the virus came from. People who have been studying coronaviruses and other viruses for decades say it’s overwhelmingly likely the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from animals, just as the 2002-2004 SARS virus did, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS virus did, as Ebola does, and as most influenza viruses do. But there’s no smoking gun- no animal being sold for food that car...

Send us Fan Mail Just about everyone has had an unpleasant fungal encounter, usually something as simple as athlete’s foot, ringworm, or dandruff. But fungal infections can become much more dangerous and even deadly, especially in people whose immune systems are damaged by another infection such as HIV, tuberculosis, or even COVID-19. Mold species such as aspergillus are in the air all the time and when breathed in by someone whose immune system is damaged, they can cause an infection known...

Send us Fan Mail Helping someone less fortunate feels good, right? But when people from rich countries show up in low- and middle-income countries dispensing goodwill and largesse, their efforts may, at best, be too little and, at worst, could do harm. Dr. Kirk Scirto, a family practice physician in Buffalo, New York, has devoted more than two decades to trying to help others through global health promotion and studying which methods are best for that work. What he’s found may sur...

Send us Fan Mail When salty water seeps into a freshwater swamp, the resident alligators risk getting sick and have to fend off invading sharks. Can a monkey scientist and a pirate cat help solve the conflict? Dr. Susannah Sandrin, Clinical Professor in Environmental Science & Science Education at Arizona State University helped make sure the science was sound in this episode of the cartoon series The Octonauts: Above & Beyond. It’s aimed at young children, but Sandrin says it’s impor...

Send us Fan Mail Infectious diseases are the second leading cause of death worldwide, killing tens of millions of people every year. COVID-19 alone has killed more than 6.8 million people, according to Johns Hopkins University. Drug-resistant superbugs directly kill 1.27 million people a year, according to one recent prominent study. Surely drug companies are all over this potentially lucrative market, with so many diseases to fight and treat? However, they aren’t. The US Food and Drug ...

Send us Fan Mail Lemurs are cute and interesting, and they live in only one place: Madagascar. As primates, they are related to humans, monkeys, and apes. They are also endangered. Dr. Travis Steffens has wanted to help save lemurs since he was a little boy. On the way to living that dream, he found out that he couldn’t save these animals without also helping the people and the environment. His charity, Planet Madagascar, works to save lemurs and improve the lives of people ...

Send us Fan Mail Can a picture lie? They can and do – especially when they are used out of context. And photographs and other imagery are regularly abused when it comes to illustrating global health. Available images illustrating disease outbreaks, refugee needs, and even benign public health campaigns routinely show Black and Brown people far more often than they do light-skinned residents of wealthy Western nations. Misery is almost always associated with color. Dr. Esmita Charani of the Un...

Send us Fan Mail From Ebola outbreaks in Africa to the spread of mpox and, of course, COVID, a disease that emerges in one place can threaten people the world over. Governments, nonprofit organizations, and pharmaceutical companies all get involved in detecting and fighting these outbreaks, but there’s another player that flies under the radar. The US military has to prepare and protect personnel and their families, and they don’t keep their work to themselves. Just outside of Washington DC, ...

Send us Fan Mail Antibiotics can be wonder drugs. Not only do they save lives, but they can also make farm animals fatten up more quickly. But their overuse hurts everyone as the germs they are designed to kill evolve more and more defenses, giving rise to superbugs that infect people and animals alike. The ROADMAP project aims to find better ways to help farmers and food producers use fewer antibiotics. In this episode of One World, One Health, we’re chatting with Dr. Nicolas Fortané, a seni...

Send us Fan Mail Can you make a difference for the planet and for your own health if you wait an extra year to update your smartphone or get a new laptop computer? You can if it means using fewer electronics products that are loaded with toxic metals, says Dr. Dele Ogunseitan, a professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California Irvine. In this episode of One World, One Health, Dr. Ogunseitan talks about how even the best-laid plans for recycling electroni...

Send us Fan Mail Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest threats people worldwide are fighting – sometimes without even knowing it’s a threat. But germs that have evolved to resist the effects of the drugs used to fight them directly kill more than a million people a year, and they’re a factor in the deaths of close to a million more. And women are far more likely to be infected with and then to spread these drug-resistant superbugs. In this episode of One World, One Health, we’re ch...

Send us Fan Mail Disease outbreaks are inevitable. Germs are part of our world, and there’s no way to completely eradicate them. But epidemics and pandemics are preventable. Vaccines, better treatments, hygiene, improvements in ventilation, and teaching people how diseases spread can all give individuals and communities the tools they need to contain disease outbreaks before they turn into epidemics and pandemics. Trust in public health and in the governments that administer public health mea...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine catching an infection that could once be cured with a few pills. But the bug causing your infection has evolved, and now that bottle of pills is useless – and even treatment in a hospital, with drugs dripped in through an IV, isn’t helping. With the emergence of drug-resistant superbugs, this terrifying scene is playing out worldwide, but the greatest burden is faced in low- and middle-income countries. These bacteria, viruses, and fungal infections cost lives, ...

Send us Fan Mail Grandmothers are a source of wisdom, support, and influence in most societies around the world. In much of the West, the emphasis is on youth, and western-based groups trying to help people in other parts of the world forget that most cultures rely on extended families. Dr. Judi Aubel, Director of the Grandmother Project, noticed early in her career in public health, adult education, and anthropology that key members of communities were being left out of discussions – the gra...

Send us Fan Mail Lots of factors make rabies the scariest virus known. It kills virtually 100% of its victims, and it’s killing close to 60,000 people a year around the world – many of them young children. Animals can carry and transmit the virus even if they have no symptoms at all, and people can develop a fatal and untreatable infection even if they do not know they’ve been exposed by a bite, scratch, or a drop of saliva. Rabies is probably the basis for myths about zombies and vampi...

Send us Fan Mail All humanity relies on forests. Even if you don’t live near one, they produce the air you breathe and are a source of food, clean water, wood, and even medicines. But people are destroying forests at an unprecedented rate, and it’s hurting not just the forests and the animals and plants in them but also human health. Diseases such as Ebola, hantavirus, Zika, chikungunya, and, yes, Covid, can all be traced to human interaction with animals of the forests. In this episode of On...

Send us Fan Mail Everyone’s heard the saying about how a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane half a world away. In this episode, we chat with One Health Trust (OHT) Founder and President Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan about how OHT’s new center in the Nimai Valley outside Bangalore, India, will incorporate this idea into its design and intent. Butterflies are fragile, but vital pollinators, and they can represent how interconnected the world is. So will the Nimai Valley Cent...

Send us Fan Mail Two centuries ago, people could die from a simple scratch. It was the pre-antibiotic era when infections killed babies within hours, a cold could turn deadly within days, and people survived injuries through luck alone. Now a pill can prevent strep throat from turning into scarlet fever and antibiotics keep surgery safe. But because bacteria evolve and mutate so quickly, many drugs are powerless against new strains. The world needs new and better antibiotics. In this episode ...

Send us Fan Mail Drug-resistant superbugs are killers. They directly kill more than a million people a year, the World Health Organization says, and contribute to five million deaths a year. But vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected in the first place, so why not make better use of vaccines to fight these superbugs? In this episode, Dr. David Heymann, a veteran of the war against infectious diseases, tells us how vaccines might be put to better use to prevent antimicrobial-re...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Dr. Nicholas White of the University of Oxford in the UK and Mahidol University in Thailand tells us how the world is losing ground in the fight against malaria, in no small part because of the emergence of resistance. Malaria is caused by a parasite transmitted by mosquitoes, and these parasites have repeatedly evolved to escape the effects of drug after drug over the decades. Now, Dr. White argues, there’s a chance to get out ahead of this resistance. How? ...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Thomas Van Boeckel tells us about how aquaculture might be helping drive the rise of drug-resistant superbugs around the world. Three-quarters of antibiotics sold globally go to farmed animals. Some of these animals are fish and shrimp. Thomas Van Boeckel studies the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and other drug-resistant microbes at the Department of Environmental Systems Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-- known as ETH Zurich. He’s...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Dr. Hsu Li Yang chats with our host Maggie Fox about how Singapore managed the COVID-19 pandemic. Singapore is a small country in Southeast Asia, but its experience with the first outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus – SARS – in 2003 and 2004 helped prepare leaders there for SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. Dr. Hsu Li Yang, Vice Dean for Global Health and program leader of infectious diseases at the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, our guests, Dr. Joakim Larsson and Dr. Amy Kirby, chat with our host, Maggie Fox, about the use of wastewater to detect known and unknown pathogens. What have we learned from tracking COVID-19 in wastewater? How can we use wastewater surveillance for monitoring antimicrobial resistance (AMR)? Could we someday detect and stop the next pandemic by sifting through sewage? Let's find out! Dr. Joakim Larsson is a Professor in Environmental Pharmacology at ...