Transcriber: 유진 김 Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Thank you!
It's indeed a pleasure to be here this morning
and to share with you some thoughts about animals, the environment, and us.
This has been termed the "One Health" movement.
It's the interface of human health, animal health, and the environment.
There's a number of things that have led to that.
It's been a concept that's been around for a long time,
actually for centuries,
but only recently, in the last decade or so,
has it gained much attention in recent years.
It's an appreciation of how humans, animals, plants, and our environment
are inextricably linked.
It's a cooperation between environmentalists
and human and veterinary medicine
to look at our world,
to look at selected endeavors,
building on common points of interest and knowledge,
working on physiology, pathology, environment epidemiology,
and many of the sciences.
It's simultaneous study of environmental and zoonotic diseases -
I'll talk about that in just a moment -
that affect people, domestic and wild animals.
And it's a role where scientists, at the most basic level,
and clinicians, at the applied level,
can work together for a better and a greater world.
Here's an image that describes that to some degree:
it's called One Health.
Many "ologies" under that umbrella.
We're going to focus on some of the ones that are called zoonotic disease
and then some issues on food safety,
and then we're going to talk about some animal models for human disease.
Just to kind of put this in context -
if we look at all of the known diseases in the world today, for humans,
60 percent of them have come from animal reservoirs
or have come from a cross pathogen across host pathogenicity.
In the recent years, in the last 30 years,
70 percent of new emerging diseases have come from animal reservoirs.
You don't have to think long to think about what some of those are.
Hantavirus, West Nile virus, SARS, Hendra virus,
all these diseases -
recently, Zika virus -
have been in the news.
They're the things that come from an animal,
oftentimes through a vector that affect us as humans.
These are called zoonoses,
the diseases that transfer between animals and people and other animals.
It's a place where close proximity can create challenges.
Many of these diseases can act as sentinels for humans.
The classic canary in the gold mine -
not from a zoonotic or infectious disease -
but would be exposure to asbestos.
If you or I were exposed to asbestos repeatedly in the workplace,
we would develop, potentially, the disease of cancer called mesothelioma
in about 45 years of our life.
If we were to expose a dog to that same environment,
that same mesothelioma that looked identical under the microscope
would develop in an average of about seven years.
So it's a setting that we want to be thinking about where this goes.
The most classic one recently, in these recent years,
is West Nile virus.
Dr. Tracey McNamara was the zoo veterinarian
at the Bronx Zoo, in New York.
She observed that numbers of crows were just dying off by the dozens,
literally by the hundreds, in that environment.
And no other animals at first were being affected.
And she sent in samples,
and she found that these animals, these crows,
had heart disease and brain disease.
She didn't know it at the time,
but there were some people in that area
that were also sick and a few died from heart disease and brain disease.
She then observed that some of the North and South American birds,
the exotic birds,
such as the flamingo pictured there,
developed a similar sign as the crows.
She would send these samples into veterinary diagnostic labs.
Then she would send them to the Centers for Disease Control
in Atlanta, Georgia,
trying to find out what's going on, what's happening.
And no one could tell her.
They said, "Oh this must be St. Louis encephalitis, a common disease."
But it didn't affect the right hosts.
She kept nagging and nagging
and finally sent some samples to the military,
to the United States Army at the USAMRIID Center,
near Washington D.C.
They began to dissect those viruses and said,
"This is new! This is different."
And then those few samples of humans began to be looked at,
and they were the same.
And this was a new virus that had never been seen.
And here was a veterinarian,
identifying things that could deal with not only animals
but could help find things with people.
And we then were able to, at least in horses,
develop a vaccine for protection.
And for us, we know that when we're out in mosquito areas,
we need to be protecting ourselves
with mosquito repellents and things like that.
Close to home, right here, a tick-borne disease, Lyme disease -
same signs in a dog that would be seen in you or I
if we were to get this infection of this Rickettsial disease.
But yet veterinarians and physicians don't often talk.
Wouldn't it be wise
that if a veterinarian practicing in a small town
would make that diagnose of Lyme disease to say,
"Would you tell your physician?
Or if anyone in your family or in your neighborhood
shows those same signs.
We know that there are ticks that carry this particular disease
that could be transmitted to people.
Same thing."
So that the physician, instead of waiting to say,
"Oh, just take an aspirin and rest for a few days,"
could begin testing for this disease early on,
before it caused any changes
as far as arthritis and other permanent changes were concerned.
Let's move from zoonotic and infectious disease
to things that we all do every day,
and that is that we eat.
And food is something that today, in today's world,
is prepared very differently than it was a century ago.
Hamburger, it goes through a large processing plant.
It could be ground up.
It could be transported.
It could be a week or so before it gets purchased and into your home,
and if there are bacteria in that,
it could be growing, even at a refrigerated temperature.
And we have things such as E. coli and Salmonella and Listeria
that are food-borne diseases.
These are diseases that can not only make us sick from food poisoning,
with vomiting and diarrhea,
but they can truly kill.
We recently had - if I said the word "Chipotle,"
I think you would think very quickly of something that's gone on last year.
A couple years ago, there was a spinach outbreak,
and it was found that much of that spinach
was contaminated from wild hogs that went through that field
and a dairy that was above that field,
and manure and rain washed that contamination onto the spinach.
It was picked, it was processed, and then people ate it.
It's a challenge to be able to see what happens.
Subtle things can occur.
If we go to petting zoos, and we pet these animals
and we lean on these fences
and we don't wash our hands before we eat,
we're transporting that.
Back to a very simple rule that we don't say in these so many words,
but folks, this is what we don't want to do.
Literally, all of these food-borne diseases
can be tracked back to manure contamination.
So whether it be in the packing plant
where the hide is not cleaned before the carcass is processed
or whether it's contamination of the environment
that we have that to be at risk.
Not only is it manure,
but we also have to think about animals that we handle
that frequently carry - in this case, turtles and Salmonella.
Salmonella is a natural inhabitant of a reptile's environment.
If we handle that animal and we do not wash our hands afterwards,
then we are susceptible to becoming infected.
So wash your hands.
Pay attention to the environment.
When food is processed,
make sure that it comes from
as clean a possibility as you can know about it,
but many times we don't know.
So if we don't know, what can we do?
We can pay attention to protect ourselves yet even further.
We can read the labels.
if you look at these particular cordon bleu chicken pieces here,
one of them looks the same as the other; one is cooked and one is uncooked.
Obviously, the cooked one should be safer
because that high temperature would create a death of the bacteria.
Even if we don't know for sure, we can begin to take precautions ourselves
and say,
What do we do to measure that temperature?
Get it up to 145 to 150 degrees,
and then the pathogens are no longer there -
not just the surface but the depth of the food as well.
This is particularly true for processed foods,
such as hamburger, such as mixed foods,
foods that have been handled by a number of people.
It's probably not as great a risk if it were a steak or a non-processed food
that hasn't had a chance
to mix up the contaminant on the outside of that food or the trimmings
and have been dealt into the center part of it.
Now, there are steaks that are tenderized, they've been needle tenderized,
and they are as a greater risk as the hamburger
because it's placed that bacteria
down into the place that would be the least hot once it was cooked.
And finally, let us move next to the last topic.
Here is a topic
of where do these animals and humans interface
and how are we alike in so many ways.
A wonderful read is a book called "Zoobiquity."
It talks about the way that animals behave,
different disease models.
I'm going to show you an example of one that I work with
as a veterinary oncologist over the years.
This is a bone tumor of dogs; it's called osteogenic sarcoma.
It's one of the best animal models for human disease
under a field called comparative medicine.
Both humans and animals -
the larger of the human,
the greater stature and the larger breeds of dogs -
are prone to this particular cancer.
This is what looks like in a dog: a simple swelling of the limb.
Under the microscope,
you would not be able to tell the difference
between a canine osteogenic sarcoma and a human osteogenic sarcoma.
Radiographically, it's the same.
Prognostically, the larger the tumor, the worse the diagnosis.
Metastatic pattern is both, in both species, to the lungs.
On your left is the normal lung;
on the right is the metastasized cancer
into the lung field.
And treatment is the same.
It requires removal of the tumor
either by amputation or by limb-sparing technique,
and then the chemotheraphy responds the same.
So again, comparative medicine.
And finally, before we close,
I would like to tell you that our animals influence how we behave.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans,
there was a tremendous problem with getting people to evacuate
because they would not leave their animals behind.
The Red Cross changed its policies and said when Hurricane Rita hit Houston,
"Please take your animals with you; we will help you transport them."
And the evacuation of Houston was much more orderly,
and people left,
and it was where people wanted to be with their animals
and would not leave them behind to suffer.
That human-animal bond.
In Third World countries, we've been able to go out and help vaccinate people
by saying, "We're coming to help protect your animals first,
and, oh, by the way, while we're vaccinating your animals
and treating them for parasites,
may we vaccinate your children to protect them from infectious diseases?"
So as I said at the beginning, this is not a new concept;
it's an old one.
Nearly two centuries old.
Between animals and human - between animal and human medicine,
there is no dividing line, nor should there be.
The object is different,
but the experience obtained constitutes the basis of all medicine.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)