Thoughts on Zoobiquity 2014:


On November 1, 2014 around 200 human and animal health professionals came together for the Zoobiquity 2014 conference in Seattle, which had a theme of "human and animal health in a changing environment". Throughout the morning case discussions about environmental drivers of obesity, domestic violence, and respiratory problems, and the afternoon walk rounds at the zoo, the theme of environment kept resurfacing, since in reality animals and humans are often sharing the same environments and experiencing health effects related to shared environmental risks.

At the very beginning of the conference, Dean Howard Frumkin polled the audience about how often in their clinical practice they had worked to alter or improve the "habitat" of their patients. About a third of the veterinarians raised their hands, compared to only a very few human health care providers. This brought home to me how natural it is to assume that animals will not thrive in inhospitable environments, whereas we often erroneously expect that humans will somehow magically adapt to all sorts of poor housing and neighborhood conditions.

As health care providers, we often see our patients in antiseptic examining rooms or hospital wards, and we easily lose any awareness of the environmental factors, both at home and in neighborhoods and workplaces that are involved in our patient's illness states. A conference like Zoobiquity 2014 reminds us how dependent we all are on healthy environments, and how the environment is a fundamental linchpin of the One Health concept. The conference key note speaker, Craig Stephen, emphasized the importance of the environment  as we strive to focus on health rather than disease. The necessary next step of course, is action to improve environmental conditions for all species. It would be great if the next One Health conference provided concrete examples of such interventions and skills training for how to move from awareness to action.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Gemina Garland-Lewis