A researcher from the Michigan State University suggests that the different sectors of the scientific community needs to work together to come up with better tools that will help them measure the health risks that specific microbes are posing to human health. Researchers, he said, must also be trained on how to use them. Prof. Jade Mitchell is a Biosystems engineering professor that is working towards that goal with the help of a $100 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Michigan State University spokeswoman, Holly Whetstone, said that, "One of the goals of the program is to link quantitative scientists, such as engineers, to biologists and social scientists."
The process that Mitchell is calling "One Health" involves a step-by-step quantitative microbial risk assessment procedure on how to figure out the level of health risk that people can incur after being exposed to various types of microorganisms. He said that, "It's important that we engage more with biologists and social scientists because their work is so important to risk assessment and the application of systems thinking to public-health problems, especially when it comes to defining and implementing management practices, which rely on how people respond to them."
The One Health training program begins in the summer of 2015 and will include two-week courses that will guide these experts along the proposed blueprint for microbe testing and other similar practices. Mitchell added that, "One of the things I like best about this program is that it brings new research into the educational environment." Many related professionals have already expressed optimism for this program especially with the world attention now trained on the unprecedented outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa where scientists and medical health workers were caught off guard by the intensity of the virulent new strain of the virus that cause a smaller scale outbreak several years ago.
