Sitting in a pig farmer’s house in the Yangon region of Myanmar, I heard a question I’d heard many times before from backyard farmers: “What will your project provide us with?” It was my last month of a year in Myanmar, undertaking fieldwork for the social science component of the Myanmar Pig Partnership, a project looking…
Why will no one listen to the pig farmers of Yangon?
Results of four-year zoonoses research showcased in One Health ‘Special Issue’
Infectious diseases traceable to animals are driven by climate change, land-use change and the massive expansion of towns and cities, according to contributors to a paper in a major new output from the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium, a STEPS Centre led project.
One Health: are we doing it wrong?
International scientific meetings are great for many reasons. But I also found myself profoundly frustrated and disappointed when I attended the 4th International One Health Congress, One Health EcoHealth 2016, in Melbourne recently.
The social life of infectious diseases: a new impact story from STEPS
A new multimedia story, ‘The social life of infectious diseases’ is the first in a new series of impact stories from the STEPS Centre. It traces how our thinking on avian flu, Ebola and other infectious diseases has evolved over the last ten years, and how we have engaged with debates, policy-making and practical action….
Agricultural revolutions then and now
I’m writing from a village 70km north of Yangon in Myanmar. A group of women farmers are talking about their experiences raising pigs. They have small herds, five to 30 head. Probably for all of them, this is their first experience of a focus group discussion and they are eager to have their say. The…
Ebola initiatives win ESRC Outstanding International Impact Prize
The Ebola Response Anthropology Platform (ERAP) and the related Ebola: lessons for development initiatives have won the prestigious Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Outstanding International Impact Prize. The team comprised leading anthropologists from the Institute of Development Studies and its partners, led by IDS director and former STEPS director Melissa Leach. The initiative built…
Research collaboration for global challenges: why it’s really hard
On 17-18 March at London Zoo was the final conference of a project I have been involved in over the past four years on zoonoses, ecosystems and wellbeing in Africa. The conference highlighted the idea of ‘One Health’, a movement aimed at linking human, livestock and ecosystem health. The focus was on how to make…
Beyond risk factors: the all-too-human world of zoonotic pandemics
Human relationships are the unquantifiable that must be accounted for in global health according to the editor of a new STEPS book on One Health.
One Health for the Real World
Welcome to the web page for our international symposium, ‘One Health for the Real World: zoonoses, ecosystems and wellbeing’, which took place at the Zoological Society of London, 17-18 March 2016.
First Ebola, now Zika: inconvenient truths about emerging diseases
In the second time in as many years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a new Global Public Health Emergency: the Zika virus crisis has been born. A new disease with another exotic name, Zika virus is predicted to infect millions in the next few months as it sweeps across the globe. Just as…