One Health

My guest is Dr. Maureen Murray.

Assistant Director of One Health at Lincoln Park Zoo's Urban Wildlife Institute in Chicago, in the US.

She studies how cities shape the health of wildlife and the people living alongside them.

And since 2018, she has been running the Chicago Red Project.

When it's really their urine and feces that... can make us sick and can be a lot more cryptic and we might not know that we're being exposed so i consider that more of a public education need i think people are becoming more aware of hantavirus and maybe how to safely clean up mouse droppings because of hantavirus but awareness of leptospirosis is not very high and it's something where if you have puddles in your alley If rats are urinating into those puddles, those leptospirosis can be persistent in water and soil for weeks at a time.

And so if you have a dog that likes to dig in soil or drink out of puddles, dogs can also get leptospirosis.

And it's a really fascinating disease to me from a One Health perspective, because you have these wildlife reservoirs, one of which is rats.

Raccoons are another.

We may do a little bit of an overlap because I know folks at Notre Dame might be trying to do a fundraiser for Dixon.

So, you know, just let us know if there's a A little bit of an overlap there because we're going to be doing that One Health lecture series in memory of Dixon.

But this is it.

And then we're going to do Vincent's favorite fundraiser, which will be Microbe TV.

And again, not to get people down at all, because I think we can absolutely overcome this, but, you know, we'll need real investment, right? We're going to need the Recovering America Wildlife Act or some vehicle, right? Like we're going to need new revenue streams to do this work.

It shouldn't be just a wildlife thing, right? It should also be about public health and I think the role of One Health and the role of preventing zoonotic disease transfer and things like that, there's all these kind of new pieces that are part of the constellation at a time when the federal budget kind of percentage at least committed to our activities has never been smaller.

And so, I mean, I think navigating that reality is going to determine our success over the next 30, 60, 90 years.

There's a lot there on where we're at with the current threats.

And to actually bring forth a proposal we determined that we had to generate a curriculum to base this proposal upon.

And we had just kind of started to work with the idea of One Health on a prior campus, the University of Global Health Equity, which was looking at One Health being the idea that human, animal, and ecological health are inextricably linked.

And it's really from the realms of public health, veterinary, medical, that this came forth and particularly to reduce zoonotic disease transmission.

To think of these things holistically is how we can kind of minimize these jumps of disease.

And this school in particular was, it's Harvard School of Public Health and Partners in Health and really trying to think about how you deliver healthcare to Sub-Saharan Africa.

And it was actually the donor that said, we want this to be a One Health institution.

And so that forced us as the designers to dig in deep and really learn about this approach.

And for us as the landscape architects just made so much sense because veterinarians had taken up the animal health aspect and medical, the medical kind of realm of, or the, you know, sorry, doctors and schools of medicine had taken up the human health aspect, but no one had really taken up the ecological aspect.

We're increasingly presented with chicken as a healthy, sustainable alternative to other meats, while the way we produce huge quantities of it raises some pretty uncomfortable questions.

And it becomes apparent that when we talk about poultry, we need to consider a one health approach because the health of animals, people and the environment are all connected.

And given we like to look at the evidence on this podcast, even when things are looking this bleak on a broader scale, what does the scientific evidence actually tell us about eating poultry? Is chicken genuinely beneficial for individual health, or is it simply less harmful than some of the foods we might replace it with? And what happens when we compare chicken, not with bacon or beef, but with beans, lentils, tofu, nuts and whole grains? Because perhaps the most important question isn't simply, is chicken healthy? It's compared with what and at what cost?

And to help us answer some of these questions, we're joined by various guests who all have expertise in this area.

And so we keep getting pulled back to this idea that smaller, more local farms are the solution.

But as you say, when you're looking at the escalating demand for meat, not just in the UK, but globally, it really seems unlikely that that would be on anybody's radar politically for solving the problem.

When I was watching a One Health clip of a conference that they were having, we were talking about it on one of our other episodes, weren't we, Daisy? It was all about, we just need to do more surveillance, we just need to have more vaccines when diseases appear, and we can manage this, we can contain it.

That sounds very dystopian to us, but I wondered what really science thought about that, because sometimes When you're a scientist, you just sort of like, well, give me a problem.