One World, One Health

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 g...

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 w...

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 neuram...

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...

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...

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 th...

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 des...

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 Chandl...

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 bur...

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 globa...

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...

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 k...

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...

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 a...

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 fa...

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...

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 Ebol...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 parasit...

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’...

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 de...

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 su...