One World, One Health
One Health Trust
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Top 10 One World, One Health Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best One World, One Health episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to One World, One Health for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite One World, One Health episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Targeting Drug Resistance – Achievable Goals to Keep Antibiotics Working
One World, One Health
06/04/24 • 15 min
The problem of antimicrobial resistance – AMR for short – is clear. More and more of these germs resistant to existing treatments are emerging everywhere, and there’s little disagreement that governments, nonprofits, doctors, patients, and politicians all need to help tackle the problem.
But people need to agree on what to do, and they need to agree on how to measure progress.
That’s where targets come in.
Aislinn Cook, a senior research fellow in infectious disease epidemiology on the antimicrobial resistance team in the Centre for Neonatal and Pediatric Infection of St. George’s University in London, is helping set some of those targets. Cook, who’s also affiliated with the Health Economics Research Centre at the University of Oxford, has helped write a series of papers in the Lancet medical journal bringing attention to the problem of antimicrobial resistance. AMR is a big topic of international discussion in 2024, due in part to it being one of the topics of the United Nations High-Level Meeting, and the Lancet series was put together to help focus that discussion.
Cook’s paper proposes some clear targets to reach by 2030: a 10 percent reduction in mortality from drug-resistant infections; a 20 percent reduction in inappropriate human antibiotic use; and a 30 percent reduction in inappropriate animal antibiotic use.
These goals should be achievable, Cook says. Listen as she tells One World, One Health about some concrete ways the world can work together to control the spread of drug-resistant germs.
Learn more about the struggle to control drug-resistant bacteria, viruses, and fungi in some of our other episodes. We’ve spoken with experts about how vaccines can help prevent the spread of drug-resistant germs, about tracking superbugs in sewage, and the surprising rise of drug-resistant fungi. Experts in drug design have talked to us about the search for new and better antibiotics and how these little organisms are winning an arms race against us. Filmmakers have told us about how storytelling can help people understand the threat while global health specialists explained that good stewardship can keep the antibiotics we have working as they should. We’ve even investigated superbug mysteries, like the case of the killer eyedrops.
New Challenges from an Ancient Disease – Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis
One World, One Health
04/18/23 • 14 min
Consumption. The White Plague. Scrofula. Tuberculosis (TB) has been known by so many names over the ages, and those names reflect just how long it’s been around and just how misunderstood it’s been. It’s killed kings and generals, playwrights, and poets.
TB still sickens 10 million people every year and kills 1.5 million – even though it’s easily prevented and can be treated. It’s unusual because it needs to be treated even if the person infected has no symptoms at all.
And even though it’s an ancient disease, TB keeps evolving into new and ever more unpleasant forms. Now, multi-drug-resistant (MDR) TB infects half a million people around the world each year, according to the World Health Organization. A third of these MDR TB infections go undetected, and that means there are tens of millions of people who do not get the treatment they need and who can go on to infect others.
Dr. Jeffrey Tornheim has been studying ways to test people to quickly and easily tell if they’ve got a drug-resistant form of TB infection and need special medications to treat it right away. Quick information can help stop the spread of these dangerous forms of the infection and can ensure that patients and health professionals don’t waste time, money, and medicine with the wrong treatments.
In this episode of One World One Health, Dr. Tornheim, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, chats with host Maggie Fox about why TB is so hard to fight and how genomics can make that fight a little easier.
Treating Antibiotics as Infrastructure
One World, One Health
02/14/23 • 16 min
Infectious diseases are the second leading cause of death worldwide, killing tens of millions of people every year. COVID-19 alone has killed more than 6.8 million people, according to Johns Hopkins University. Drug-resistant superbugs directly kill 1.27 million people a year, according to one recent prominent study.
Surely drug companies are all over this potentially lucrative market, with so many diseases to fight and treat? However, they aren’t. The US Food and Drug Administration has not approved a new antibiotic since 2019, and only one truly new antibiotic has been approved since 1987.
It’s partly because the money just isn’t there. Companies making cancer drugs raised about $7 billion in funding in 2020, while companies making antibiotics raised a fraction of that – just $160 million. Plus, it’s hard to bring a new drug to market. The National Institutes of Health estimates 90% of experimental drugs never even make it to testing in humans.
In this episode, we are chatting with Kevin Outterson, a professor of law at Boston University and the founding Executive Director and Principal Investigator of Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator or CARB-X, a global nonprofit partnership funded by the U.S., U.K., and German governments; Wellcome; and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Professor Outterson argues that antibiotics should be treated as infrastructure, and companies making new drugs to fight antimicrobial-resistant bacteria, viruses, and fungi –often called superbugs – should be treated as vital government contractors and paid upfront for the work they do that could save tens of millions of lives. Listen as he describes the problem, and potential solutions, with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox.
Monkeypox - Stopping the Spread and the Stigma
One World, One Health
08/16/22 • 12 min
In this episode, our guest, Dr. Ali Khan, talks to our host, Maggie Fox, about what the World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency, monkeypox.
Is monkeypox similar to COVID-19? Why is this disease spreading so quickly now? Is this cause for panic? Let’s find out!
Will superbugs win the arms race against humanity?
One World, One Health
09/12/23 • 11 min
Humans developed antibiotics in the 20th century. These wonder drugs defeat killer microbes and have revolutionized medicine, making surgeries and treatments like chemotherapy much safer. Unfortunately, people are overusing and misusing antibiotics, helping bacteria learn how to defend themselves against these lifesaving drugs.
Antimicrobial resistance is one of the top 10 global health threats. Drug-resistant microbes directly killed nearly 1.3 million people in 2019 – more than breast cancer, for example. The World Health Organization predicts they’ll kill as many as 10 million people a year by 2050 if humanity doesn’t act.
Can we take action to control the drug resistance these germs continuously build up, and can we develop new and better drugs for our arsenal against these killer bacteria?
Dr. Manica Balasegaram hopes so. As Executive Director of The Global Antibiotic Research & Development Partnership, he’s working to encourage the development of better antibiotics that target the infections that affect people the most – and then to get them to the people who most need them.
Listen as Manica chats with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about the ways he hopes to help solve this life-or-death problem.
Can Vaccines Help Slow the Spread of Superbugs?
One World, One Health
11/21/23 • 12 min
Vaccines are lifesavers. Childhood vaccines save 4 million lives every year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And it turns out vaccines don’t just save lives by directly preventing disease. They can save lives by reducing the rise of drug-resistant pathogens (mostly bacteria and viruses). This is because people who are vaccinated are less likely to get sick and to get treated either appropriately or inappropriately with antibiotics and antiviral drugs. And less use of these valuable drugs means less opportunity for germs to develop resistance to them.
The One Health Trust set out to quantify just how well vaccination could reduce the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance or drug-defying germs.
The latest report from the One Health Trust pulls together a variety of studies showing the impact of vaccines not only on drug resistance but also on economies, especially in low- and middle-income countries.
Some highlights:
- A typhoid vaccination campaign for infants could prevent more than 53 million cases of drug-resistant typhoid in low- and middle-income countries over 10 years.
- A successful rotavirus vaccination program in Africa and Asia could prevent more than 13 million cases of diarrhea that otherwise would be treated with antibiotics – reducing opportunities for bacteria to evolve resistance to those drugs.
- In Indonesia alone, vaccinating 50% of eligible people with pneumococcal vaccine over five years could save more than US$2 million in costs related to treatment failure.
One Health Trust Fellow and Director of Partnerships, Dr. Erta Kalanxhi, led the team that put together the report. Listen as she chats with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about how vaccines can prevent the rise of drug-resistant bacteria and viruses.
Vaccines for Adults Pay Off in Both Lives and Money
One World, One Health
04/23/24 • 13 min
Vaccines save lives. There’s no doubt about this: childhood vaccination saves four million lives every year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Children worldwide get a long list of vaccines, but what about adults?
A study by the Office of Health Economics (OHE), an independent research organization, took a look at the cost-effectiveness of four commonly given adult vaccines: the influenza vaccine, pneumococcal vaccines that protect against a batch of respiratory infections, the herpes zoster vaccine that protects against shingles, and the RSV vaccine that prevents respiratory syncytial virus.
To get a good idea of the value across different types of economies and cultures, they looked at 10 countries: Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, South Africa, Thailand, and the United States. On average, the report found, these 4 adult vaccines gave a 19-fold return, meaning that the benefits equaled 19 times the costs of vaccination. On average, it worked out to US$4,637 per person vaccinated.
Some of the savings are direct – people didn’t rack up hospital costs or miss work if they were vaccinated and evaded serious illness. Some savings were indirect. For instance, “receiving the influenza vaccine reduces the risk of having a stroke and subsequent hospitalization in older adults by 16 percent,” the report reads. “Cancer patients vaccinated with the influenza vaccine also had statistically significantly better survival outcomes, including longer progression-free survival rates and overall survival compared to unvaccinated patients.”
One study cited in the report found that Italian adults vaccinated against flu were 13 percent less likely to die of any cause – not just flu, but any cause – over the 2018-2019 winter flu season than unvaccinated adults.
In this episode of One World, One Health, Dr. Lotte Steuten, Deputy CEO of OHE and co-author of the report, chats about how her team came up with their findings.
Forecasting for Hunger
One World, One Health
12/12/23 • 16 min
It’s heartbreaking when a drought or flood causes crops in a region to fail, and children to go hungry. Kids can starve to death or endure social, economic, and health problems well into adulthood due to malnutrition.
But what if there was a way to predict when these weather disasters are likely to happen, so governments, aid organizations, and residents could prepare?
A team at the University of Chicago says people could already do this, using one of the best-known weather patterns: the El Niño Southern Oscillation or ENSO.
“ENSO has destabilizing effects on agriculture, economic production, and social stability throughout areas of the global tropics that are teleconnected to it. It has been linked to human health outcomes directly through its effects on vector- and water-borne infectious diseases, as well as indirectly by decreasing agricultural yields and increasing food insecurity and the likelihood of conflict,” they write in a Nature Communications article.
It's possible to predict this Pacific Ocean-based pattern, says Dr. Amir Jina, an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago. In this episode of One World, One Health, listen as Dr. Jina explains how people could use predictions about El Niño years to get ahead of some of the forces that make children go hungry.
Never Again: Making Sure Patients Get the Air They Need
One World, One Health
05/14/24 • 16 min
The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was especially bad in India. Patients filled hospitals as the Delta variant swept the country in April of 2021. As many as 2,000 people died every day.
Many died literally gasping for air. Although India is a major producer of medical oxygen, supplies ran out amid the unprecedented demand. And while some areas of the vast country had access to medical oxygen, there was no good system for transferring them to places with more need.
It was a horrifying disaster as people who might otherwise have survived succumbed to COVID-19 or other conditions for lack of medical oxygen.
India wasn't the only country with this type of crisis. Oxygen became a black market item in Peru, Supplies were rationed in the UK and patients lined up to fill empty oxygen cylinders in countries around the world, including Brazil, Somalia, and Indonesia.
It should never happen again, says Varun Manhas, Associate Director of Public Health Programs for the One Health Trust. Varun is working to build a national oxygen grid for India and then share the blueprints with the world.
The National Medical Oxygen Grid isn't what would come to mind for many. It's a cellphone-based app to help hospitals and health officials keep track of where medical oxygen is needed and where supplies are plentiful. The app could be used to make sure no one runs out of oxygen in future crises.
You can hear more about the Global need for medical oxygen in this earlier episode of One World, One Health.
The Case of the Killer Eye Drops
One World, One Health
05/16/23 • 16 min
It was a real mystery. People showing up at hospitals and clinics across the US were infected with a rare and troubling strain of bacteria that was resistant to most of the drugs used to treat it.
The strain itself had never been seen before. It was Pseudomonas aeruginosa, itself nothing rare. But this one carried a genetic change that allowed it to shake off the effects of even the strongest antibiotics usually used to treat it. Where had it come from?
It took a good deal of detective work, but the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health officials finally figured out the common source was eye drops. They tracked down a couple of brands of eye lubricants and contained the outbreak.
Now they’re working to find out how this particular germ got into eye drops in the first place, and how it acquired the mutations that made it so impervious to treatment. And they’re working to make sure that it’s not still lurking in the bodies of unsuspecting people.
Dr. Maroya Walters, a CDC epidemiologist and commander in the US Public Health Service, helped lead the investigation. In this episode of One World, One Health, Dr. Walters explains how the team tracked down the source of the unusual outbreak, and how it demonstrates that superbugs know no borders.
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FAQ
How many episodes does One World, One Health have?
One World, One Health currently has 85 episodes available.
What topics does One World, One Health cover?
The podcast is about Climate Change, Podcasts, Science and Global Health.
What is the most popular episode on One World, One Health?
The episode title 'Cholera – Has Climate Change Given New Life to an Old Enemy?' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on One World, One Health?
The average episode length on One World, One Health is 15 minutes.
How often are episodes of One World, One Health released?
Episodes of One World, One Health are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of One World, One Health?
The first episode of One World, One Health was released on Jul 29, 2022.
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