COVER STORY
ONE WORLD,
ONE HEALTH U OF G AT FOREFRONT OF NEW GLOBAL APPROACH
“
I was eight years old, and I wanted to be a monkey.” When that plan fell through, Travis Steffens decided to do the next best thing. He studied primates for his B.Sc., followed by grad studies in anthropology. During his first trip to Madagascar, he wanted to learn more about the impacts of habitat loss on endangered lemurs, those ring-tailed creatures perhaps best known to many viewers through the animated film series named after the African island nation. Steffens quickly realized that focusing on the animals and their environs left out a key third element: people. Today his research at the University of Guelph—and a nonprofit he founded in 2015 called Planet Madagascar— aims to understand the wider health interactions among humans, animals and environment to help conserve all three components. That trifecta is a classic One Health problem – although Steffens wasn’t calling it that initially: “I saw myself as a primate conservation ecologist.” No, no, said a colleague, you’re a One Health researcher. It was the 14 | PORTICO Summer 2022
colleague who pointed him to a pertinent faculty opening in social sciences at U of G. Now a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Steffens finds himself among numerous experts from across campus who bring a holistic One Health approach to teaching, research and outreach in a variety of fields. As pathobiology professor Dr. Scott Weese, chief of infection control in the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) Health Sciences Centre, says, “One Health is the intersection between human and animal and environmental health. The approach shows how we are all interrelated.” And it’s vital for addressing what OVC dean Dr. Jeff Wichtel calls “complex, wicked problems” that defy straightforward solutions involving human or animal medicine alone. Think of the COVID-19 pandemic, believed to have been sparked after a coronavirus long harboured in wild animals leapt to people. Think of antimicrobial resistance that develops after “super-bugs” eluding
livestock antibiotics enter farm fields and streams. Think of the potential in an increasingly crowded world— one marked by urban expansion, increased travel and mobility, habitat destruction, encroachment of farming on natural spaces—for various diseases from Ebola to avian influenza to jump to humans. “These are problems that can only be solved if we bring people from many disciplines together,” says Wichtel. We still need doctors and veterinarians and ecologists, he allows. But we also need “natural scientists, social scientists, people from all backgrounds including animal and human health who can think across systems. It’s a systems-thinking approach.” Tackling those complex problems and equipping grads with pertinent skills are the goals of a campus-wide initiative that now links all seven U of G colleges in One Health research and teaching in what is arguably the most comprehensive such undertaking for a Canadian institution. The University has
ILLUSTRATION: AMANDA SCOTT, KAITLIN GALLANT
STORY BY ANDREW VOWLES
