Health Talk | Building resilience in the post-Covid-19 world: PHFI and University of Sydney join forces for ‘One Health’
The collaboration focuses on disease surveillance, antimicrobial resistance, innovation, and training future health professionals
Last week, the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) along with the University of Sydney, launched a partnership to tackle pressing health issues pertaining to ‘One Health’, including the rise of infectious diseases.
World Health Organisation (WHO) describes ‘One Health’ as an integrated, unifying approach to balance and optimise the health of people, animals, and the environment. It has been particularly emphasised to prevent, predict, detect, and respond to new and emerging infectious diseases such as Covid-19.
The joint programme of PHFI and the University of Sydney is designed to focus on four critical pillars — disease surveillance, antimicrobial resistance, innovation (including vaccine development), and training the next generation of health professionals, according to the people handling the project.
Professor Antoine van Oijen, associate dean (research), University of Sydney, explains why such partnerships are required in today’s world.
“We started to recognise many years ago that health is global health, so we need to work together in tackling the problems that our society is facing. We need to identify those collaborative projects around research or teaching or combinations of both that will lead as quickly as possible to true impact where it counts,” he said.
“For me, this collaboration is about identifying what areas of expertise between the two organisations can be put together to set activities in motion. It’s all about exploring mutual synergies to ensure we build the next generation of health care providers, researchers, and educators that can scale the capacity for our countries to tackle these problems,” van Oijen added.
‘One Health’ is a vast subject; therefore, there is also the need to identify priorities within the programme.
Keeping this in mind, the technical experts from both institutions will co-design the research programme based on India’s national priorities, for which the University of Sydney has committed 100,000 Australian dollars.
“The work we do we always keep in mind two things — what’s the impact of that work and whether it’s addressing the equity problem. And it’s not going to be just between PHFI and the University of Sydney but many other institutions and organisations that we have invited for further collaborations such as the Indian Council of Medical Research, Niti Aayog, Manipal Institute, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and Jawaharlal Nehru University,” said Sanjay Zodpey, president, PHFI.
“The efforts of our work are complementary to the government; we align our work with national priorities only. In fact, in some of the initiatives we will be working with the government as well.”
Jocelyne Basseal, associate director, infection prevention and control portfolio, the University of Sydney, said, “You need funding to do research, so this is our commitment to this relationship to make it a success. We have seen during Covid-19 how these novel diseases can spread from country to country. It’s a global problem and it’s true that no one is safe until everyone is safe. We cannot work as isolated nations in the world we have to be able to support each other and come up with designs together.”
The relevance of global equitable access while managing public health crises came to the fore when the world was tackling the Covid-19 crisis. That is when this valuable piece of wisdom — No one is safe until everyone is safe — resonated with governments, UN agencies, and others working to manage the pandemic. Covid-19 may no longer be a global public health emergency, the learning from it is still relevant and will continue to come in handy in managing future pandemics.
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