Clear Lake Area Chamber Of Commerce: Clear Lake Connections Podcast Episode 57 | Embracing The One Health Approach.

Press release from the Clear Lake Area Chamber Of Commerce:

February 17, 2022

This week on Clear Lake Connections Podcast presented by UTMB Health: Meet Dr. Gregory Gray, Infectious Disease Epidemiologist at UTMB. In this weeks episode, Dr. Gray discusses the specifics of the One Health Initiative, humans inner linkage with animals and the environment and how they are trying to develop a different approach to health training. Dr. Gray also talks about the remarkable discoveries the One Health Initiative has uncovered and the how their active studies around the world are helping them change medicine.

Dr. Gray has joined UTMB from Duke University and he is a proponent of the one health approach to solve wicked problems. The One Health Initiative is a way to bring in various disciplines that need to be engaged to approach the problem and solve it. This concept is old, and it has to do with our inner linkage with animals and the environment. You can’t really separate the three. Human health, animal health and environmental health. They develop a different approach to training and while he was trained in medicine, he didn’t really understand anything about what veterinarians or what environmental health professionals did either. So, they are having to re-connect with people from different disciplines when they look at these complicated problems.

UTMB brought him in to do the One Health approach more in the limelight with what UTMB is doing. They are currently trying to brand it to where it is honoring all of their investments. UTMB is heavily engaged in looking for diseases that move back and forth between humans and animals and looking at environmental factors such as populations of insects that may carry these diseases. They are trying to bring together the faculty, staff, and scientists to increase training and better promote what is going on and build on that.

He is also an infectious disease epidemiologist, and he studies respiratory viruses like the Coronavirus. Also, he looks at the influence of viruses such as cold viruses and many more. His group looks at many different families of these. What he has learned from all of this has been the influences of different viruses. He has learned a lot from his veterinary colleagues and how these to practices are so unique. He has also benefitted from environmental health sciences, and he has learned about the devices that those in human medicine are not experienced with. All of this has led to remarkable discoveries.

UTMB is extraordinary when it comes to training environments and institutional support. They do have One Health training programs here in Texas but also to international scholars. The idea is to equip them to respond more efficiently quickly to whatever we may encounter next. This has involved partnering with Texas A&M and just helping younger scholars how to understand skills that may be outside of their sphere and what they can offer.

Interconnectedness is a two way street; they do their best to provide bio security but the people in these centers suffer greatly. Sometimes, animal workers have introduced human pathogens to animals. If they are looking for the next generation of threats, they need to look where there are dense populations of humans and close contact with a dense population of animals. This is a very pro-active approach that makes all of this not so expensive and not so complex and is also compatible to partners. The philosophy has changed over time.

Right now, they have active studies in many countries around the world. It is important to them to engage their partners in these counties to do one health type of studies. Embracing the One Health approach is very important and it is the way to problem solve and how many of the studies they are currently working on and how the findings are changing medicine.

This press release was produced by the Clear Lake Area Chamber Of Commerce. The views expressed here are the author’s own.