Earlier this month I traveled to Cambodia to conduct a week-long One Health Strategy Development Workshop for an NGO client. I have been conducting One Health workshops and giving presentations for more than a decade. This recent workshop was, by far, the most exciting! Often when we talk about One Health, our goal is to raise awareness of the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health. This is, obviously, a worthy objective.
What made my recent workshop so exciting was that we started with the goal of making concrete changes to core program activities that will prevent disease outbreaks in animals and people, protect local resources, and improve food safety and security. At the end of the workshop, country office teams from Cambodia, India, Bangladesh, and Nepal had each developed One Health Action Plans with dozens of concrete actions to integrate One Health concepts into core program activities. To me, there isn’t anything more exciting than translating important ideas into concrete action!