One Health InstituteVolume 2 | July 2018
What Does One Health in Action Look Like?
One Health’s way of working is deeply rooted in community-based action to co-develop sustained inter-sectoral, inter-professional, transdisciplinary partnerships that are place-sourced and resident-centered. Place-sourcing provides the necessary context and system boundaries for specific desired outcomes in partnerships. No two places are the same and having a deep context within the place is necessary for effectiveness.
Resident-centering is essential to realize the three One Health Institute (OHI) principles since residents must be involved in co-designing and co-producing futures we desire, collaborating across boundaries, and allowing greater sensing of the systems in a place. Experiential and community knowledge can be combined with transdisciplinary, institutional knowledge to create the sustained collaboratives necessary for effective action and transformation. Overall, this requires a shift in the university system from being supply-driven (the interests of the faculty being brought out into communities) to demand-responsive (the community’s needs and agency being sensed, understood, and transformed into collective action with OHI and its partners).
OHI has identified ts first places of action by looking at CSU’s locations and commitments beyond OHI. CSU’s main campus is in Fort Collins, so that is one of OHI’s places and where its first projects have manifest. CSU also has campuses and centers in Pueblo, Denver, and Todos Santos, Mexico. All of these are being engaged as resources and opportunities permit. Beyond these locations, other locations in CO make sense for a number of reasons; including CSU’s experienced and distributed assets throughout the state developed by CSU’s extension and engagement offices. Furthermore, through partnerships co-developed by the Director during the 2016-7 period, opportunities exist as well in Longmont CO, Guatemala (in partnership with the Colorado School of Public Health’s Center for Global Health and their 10 years of work in the location), and Brazilian Amazon (state of Pará). Stay tuned to this newsletter and our events to learn more about the opportunities in these places.
OHI Welcomes First Postdoc
The One Health Institute welcomes Hannah Saunders, an infant mental health postdoctoral fellow, to their team this month. She is working on a community-engaged research project that aims to reduce housing instability and toxic stress among mobile home park residents. Long-term, Hannah hopes to continue this work by developing trauma-informed and culturally grounded interventions to prevent and treat toxic stress among vulnerable families. Hannah completed her Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Science at Colorado State University this summer, and she completed a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy here at CSU, in 2016. Hannah grew up in Oak Creek, Wisconsin and attended college at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. In her undergraduate career, she studied child psychology and discovered a passion for early child development. Outside of work, Hannah enjoys trail running, traveling, photography, hiking, and spending time with family and friends.
Partner Spotlight: Center for Global Health
The Colorado School of Public Health’s Center for Global Health (CGH) is located at the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. It is a multidisciplinary center with a global mission of service, education and research. In order to address complex global health problems, CGH works in partnership with Children’s Hospital Colorado and with partners around the World. To fulfill its mission – to catalyze equitable partnerships in teaching, research, practice and service to make innovative and creative advances in the global standard of health – CGH faculty, fellows, residents and students from the University of Colorado School of Public Health, Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Pharmacy, Business, Engineering, Architecture, and Liberal Arts work together and with global partners.
The Center for Global Health focuses on family and child health, development of community health systems, translational research (vaccines, treatment and diagnostics), adult non-communicable diseases, occupational health, and education. Among values promoted by the CGH are the right of all humans to enjoy the best health possible, reciprocity in teaching and learning with global partners and sharing with generosity the unique experience, perspectives and skills of Coloradans and the University of Colorado. These values are expressed in past and/or current projects in Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China, Guatemala, Ghana, South Africa, Democratic Republic Congo, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Zambia, Switzerland, USA and Zimbabwe.
In 2011, the CGH collaborated with a local foundation and the private sector to develop the Center for Human Development (CDH), to help address high rates of maternal-child mortality and malnutrition in southwest Guatemala. Creating a University-Private Partnership, a rural clinic was built in the coastal lowlands of southwestern Guatemala, and it started operating in March 2014. It has six clinic rooms, a dental clinic, a clinical and a research laboratory, pharmacy, central nurse station, new computers, and an electronic medical record system. In this newsletter, we want to highlight the maternal, newborn and child health Growing Healthy/Creciendo Sanos program. It provides pregnancy care, birth support, newborn and young child health checks, and monthly care and support groups that provide mothers with advice to promote child’s physical health and neurodevelopment. Pregnant women and children 0-2.9 years are enrolled and prospectively supported by the program until the child reaches 3 years of age. The program has enrolled 1,236 pregnant women and 994 children.
One Health Travels
Amazônia—Belém, Pará, Brazil—A UNESCO Creative Cities of Gastronomy Site
It’s hard to imagine the size of the Amazon forest, or Amazônia as one would say in Portuguese. In a recent trip with Diana Wall (CSU-SoGES), André Franco (SoGES/CSU Biology), and Zaid Abdo (CSU Microbiology Immunology and Pathology) to work on a pilot study on soil biodiversity and land use, we got to hear a presentation from The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation’s (EMBRAPA) Eastern Amazônia Center in Belém about their activities. The first slide showed a map of western Europe superimposed on Amazônia and all of western Europe could fit in Amazônia with room left over! The ‘nearby’ (to Belém) town of Paragominas, where our work was centered, is ‘only’ about 5-6h drive away! And you can drive, since in many cases the way to get to places in Amazônia can still involved long periods of time on boats….
Belém acts as a ‘gateway’ to the lower Amazon, and what a wonderful place in which to arrive, since Belém has recently been awarded the prestigious UNESCO Creative Cities of Gastronomy Site, meaning exceptionally unique and delicious fares, based on traditional Amazonian cuisines, can be experienced at this gateway. Perhaps the most famous one outside of the Amazon today is Açaí (Euterpe oleracea), a major component of indigenous diets that has become famous globally most likely through the initial ‘discovery’ by foreign surfers in Rio de Janeiro.
Of course Belém, being a city carved out of the Amazon jungle, is much more than a culinary site. The Amazon jungle is arguably the world’s most important ecosystem. Our wok to build partnerships there recognizes this fact and binds it with the deep capabilities and interest of CSU and its partners for working on matters of sustainable development and One Health. Over the last two years our work has led to coordination with the work of John Spencer (CSU-MIP) over the last years looking at leprosy in the region and the role of armadillos as vectors, which continues and is expanding. Through those partners, CSU-OHI has put together with colleagues at Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPa) an application for funding of bi-directional international exchange for graduate students, post-docs and faculty. If awarded, it would fund four years of exchanges. This would allow significant expansion of the work in leprosy, as well as a deeper engagement with UFPa through more faculty and student involvement from diverse areas in the intersections of public health, veterinary public health, and ecological public health, which constitutes the ultimate sweet spot for One Health, whatever the initial point of entry. Read more about the work in Amazonia.
Meet Our Fellows
Assistant Professor, Dr. Daniel Graham
College of Natural Sciences, Department of Psychology
Save the Date: September 11
Drexel University sharing their groundbreaking anchor institution experiences. You don’t want to miss this!!! More details to come in next months newsletter.
