One Health- Stirling

 

We want to build a new interdisciplinary approach to engage with One Health because it has emerged as an important framework for understanding and enhancing human, animal, and environmental health for both terrestrial and aquatic systems.

 

Key elements are the linkages between wild, unmanaged populations of animals, domesticated stocks and the expanding human population that exploits both for food and other needs. Wild animal populations are increasingly under pressure from loss or erosion of habitat quality but also through the demand for their perceived high value for humans as food and medicine.  Rapidly increasing production of domesticated livestock and fish based on intensification, exacerbate the use of antimicrobials that in turn threaten human health through stimulating emergence of drug-resistant pathogens. Both trends are contributing to biodiversity loss and have been implicated in the emergence and spread of epizootic disease such as Covid-19.

 

Moreover, increased consumption of livestock products has been closely linked to poor human and environmental health and to be a major driver of Climate Change. We want to organise public engagement events and workshops in Vietnam and China, two countries where such beliefs and their impacts are widespread, to better understand behaviours of value chain members with regard to the harvest, distribution, and consumption of these products.

 

A key element will be to stimulate academic engagement and scholarship around such a critical phenomenon. The values underpinning the demand for wild and domesticated animals for food and medicine will be assessed using a cross-institutional and interdisciplinary approach to identify the cultural and linguistic knowledge gaps around food perception and how it is translated and assimilated into their public health and environmental policies.

 

This project features two events:

Event 1: Project start-up workshop.   

Event 2: 3-day workshops in Vietnam, including delineating theoretical and methodological frameworks.

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