The One Healt system proposes a global method in which several disciplines against infections converge. One of its top representatives is Dr. David Rodríguez Lázaro, who will participate in the V Veterinary Congress of Food Safety of the Canary Islands which will be held from next Friday, November 25, at 3.30 pm, until the following day at 9.00 pm, at the Palacio de Congresos de Canarias-Auditorio Alfredo Kraus in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. A total of eleven veterinarians, biologists or experts in different areas of food safety will participate in this event, who will address the issue from different perspectives.
Rodriguez Lazarus He will speak on the first day, at 19:00, with the presentation Food safety from the point of view of One Health. Graduated in Veterinary Medicine and in Food Science and Technology from the University of León, the expert has carried out research stays in institutions of recognized international prestige.
“You have to distinguish between what is health and what is hygiene,” says the researcher
“Health is a complete concept in which one must distinguish between what is health and what is hygiene”, Rodríguez Lázaro stresses from the start. “Therefore, it is a very broad concept that has to cover different aspects, not only human health but also animal health and environmental health have to be involved because they are closely related,” he adds.
The fact is that 60% of the diseases that affect man, between 400 and 1,000, are of a zoological nature, transmissible from animals to humans. And if we talk about those that have appeared in the last 30 years, that number reaches 75%, “so three out of four infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic in nature,” he underlines. And the most widespread, such as rabies, Ebola or covid 19, are zoonoses that originated in animals and passed from the species to humans, “with which an exclusively healthcare approach focused exclusively on human health is something very short-sighted and simplistic”, adds the expert. From his point of view, “animal and environmental health must be taken into consideration because in the end we live in a global world where there are no longer any geographical barriers”. This concept of health global integrates different fields that include humans, the environment and animals, which also includes psychological and social aspects to discover how cultural and economic behaviors can influence different aspects of health.One of the most important examples One Health deals with it would be the silent pandemic we are suffering from infections caused by multi-resistant bacteria.” Ultimately everything is interrelated. The massive release of antibiotics, which often v es discharged into the environment, favors the resistance of bacteria that end up in animals and, subsequently, from animals to humans and vice versa,” he clarifies. “Urban wastewater that contains many bacteria can end up in the environment and re-enter the animal cycle. And if we don’t have a healthy environment and adequate animal health, we won’t have adequate human health. That’s why focusing on a compartmentalized approach is a mistake,” he says. The expert recalls that the behavior of the social situation has also been shown to determine the effect of an outbreak of any kind. “It has been shown that there are more obese children when the socio-economic situation is higher. That there have been more cases of tuberculosis or infections of different types in the most disadvantaged areas of cities. Therefore, cultural and social aspects make us behave in a way that sometimes protects us and other times us disadvantages in the development of infections “, he adds.
«Urban wastewater can end up in the environment and go back into the animal cycle»
To deal with them more effectively it would be necessary to do it in a complete and multidisciplinary way, to have teams that include not only doctors, not only veterinarians, but also environmental health experts, veterinarians, biologists, sociologists and psychologists. to understand what the behavior is. Rodríguez Lázaro also addresses the anti-vaccination surge in outrageous fashion. “I am very aware that in developed countries there are very exacerbated anti-vaccine movements when in developing countries they are crazy to access those same vaccines. And this happens because we have a different perspective, a social perspective that we believe we are safe and we don’t need them. For this reason, “when making a general health policy” it is necessary to have not only medical experts, but also economists, sociologists, psychologists and veterinarians and people who are also dedicated to the environment. «This week we have become more than 8 billion people, when in the last century we were just one billion. We have multiplied the population by more than seven in just one hundred years and this is due to three fundamental facts,” he recalls. One was the chlorination of water, i.e. “having potable water”. Other antibiotics. But mainly it was due to the appearance of vaccines. “The vaccination quota has managed to eradicate a disease such as smallpox which has caused more deaths than all wars in history”, recalls the expert.
