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One World, One Health

One World, One Health
Author: One Health Trust
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© 2025 One World, One Health
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One World, One Health is brought to you by the One Health Trust. In this podcast, we bring you the latest ideas to improve the health of our planet and its people. Our world faces many urgent challenges from pandemics and decreasing biodiversity to pollution and melting polar ice caps, among others. This podcast highlights solutions to these problems from the scientists and experts working to make a difference.
92 Episodes
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Send us a text Drug-resistant germs are hidden killers in more than one way. Not only are the microbes invisible to the human eye, in many places, they’re invisible because people simply are not looking for them systematically. Doctors often do not know what infections their patients have and treat them based on best guesses, which allows for ineffective treatments and exacerbates drug resistance. Policymakers don’t know which infections are most common among populations and cannot make infor...
Send us a text It’s a common scenario for a cancer patient. They’re undergoing treatment and get what’s known as a peripherally inserted central catheter or PICC (pronounced “pick”) line to make it more convenient to administer drugs. They are in and out of the hospital or just the clinic frequently to see various providers. The treatment they receive may run down their immune system a little bit. Just having cancer may have damaged their immune system. So then they get an infection. Perhaps ...
Send us a text It’s a really bad year for measles. Cases are spiking in countries where children should have been fully vaccinated, such as the United States, Canada, and Mexico. More than 1,000 cases have been reported in the United States just in the first half of 2025, with at least 3 deaths. The death of a child in Texas early in 2025 was the first time a child had died from the infection in the United States since 2003. It’s even worse in Canada, with more than 2,500 reported cases. ...
Send us a text Zombie movies may score at the box office and shows about dangerous contagions including “The Last of Us” may be a hit on streaming services, but preparedness for disasters is no winner for American politicians. Every recent U.S. presidential administration has dismantled the pandemic plan put together by the previous one, notes Dr. Asha M. George, Executive Director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. However, the cuts being made by the new Trump administration t...
Send us a text The scene on the beach was horrific. Thousands of mothers and baby elephant seals lay in the sand, taken out by a deadly virus. Dr. Marcela Uhart and her colleagues were shocked by what they found after the H5N1 avian influenza virus swept through a colony of elephant seals on the coast of Argentina’s far south Patagonia region. More than 17,000 of the animals had died, their bodies ravaged by the virus. H5N1 bird flu has swept around the world, destroying poultry flocks and wi...
Send us a text Plastic is everywhere. So are drug-resistant microbes. What happens when the two team up? A raft of new studies show that bacteria can grow well on plastics, especially on microplastics. Other studies show just how widespread microplastics are – they are found in every ocean and sea tested so far. The most startling studies show these tiny bits of plastics can also build up in the human body, including in the liver and brain. Science is done piece by piece, study by study, with...
Send us a text It’s been a dire year for global health. Almost as soon as he took office as president of the United States, Donald Trump said he would withdraw the country from membership in the World Health Organization (WHO), he fired almost everyone at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and slashed staffing and budgets at U.S. health agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The United States...
Send us a text Air pollution is a big killer. Air pollution of all kinds helped kill 4.2 million people globally in 2019, according to the World Health Organization. It can damage nearly every organ in the body, worsening asthma and leading to cancer and heart disease. It especially affects pregnant women and can damage a growing fetus. Air pollution also has more insidious effects. Dr. Álvaro Hofflinger of Arizona State University and colleagues studied school children in a part of Chile whe...
Send us a text It’s hard to overstate how popular writer John Green is. His most famous book, The Fault in Our Stars – a novel about teenagers with cancer, young love, and fate – has sold tens of millions of copies. The film based on the book brought in more than $300 million and it’s still popular to this day. Green has become a YouTube star and leader of online communities of fans including Nerdfighteria, as well as a co-host of an annual fundraiser for Project for Awesome. He's also p...
Send us a text People have always doubted science. In the 17th century, Galileo was sentenced to house arrest by the Catholic Church for reporting his observations that the sun is at the center of the solar system and that the other planets, including Earth, orbit it. In 1925, the U.S. state of Tennessee banned the teaching of evolution and when a high school teacher named John Scopes agreed to challenge the law, the Scopes “monkey” trial resulted. People did not like to think that they desce...
Send us a text Measles is an extremely infectious virus that can both kill and cripple children. Luckily, there are highly effective vaccines to prevent the disease. The World Health Organization recommends that 95 percent of the population be fully vaccinated against measles because it’s so contagious. This helps to ensure that vulnerable children and infants who cannot be vaccinated are protected. Yet vaccination rates are falling globally. The result? A 20 percent increase in measles cases...
Send us a text Governments and corporations are “undermining our future” by supporting fossil fuels in the face of overwhelming evidence that using coal, oil, and gas is killing people, a startling new report finds. The report, from the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, finds that in 2023 alone, more than double the number of people over 65 died from excessive heat compared to the 1990s. People living in every country around the world are now threatened by the effects of climate ...
Send us a text Children under five years old are fragile. They’re more vulnerable than adults to malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, and other infections. A growing number of these infections that sicken and kill children are resistant to the drugs developed to treat them – a phenomenon known as antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. AMR is a big killer. Nearly five million deaths are caused in part by drug-resistant infections each year. While the percentage of children killed by these infections has f...
Send us a text Smallpox may be gone but it’s got a cousin called mpox, and that virus is now spreading fast across parts of Africa. As of October 2024, this mpox outbreak had infected more than 40,000 people, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 1,000 people have died from the infection. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries to be a Pub...
Send us a text Farmers need land to grow their crops, and in many parts of the world, that means clearing forests. That’s especially true in the Amazon region in South America. Crops just won’t grow under the thick forest canopy, so a new banana plantation means clearing trees. This has all sorts of effects on the ecosystem and researchers are seeing a new one. A virus called Oropouche was identified back in the 1950s, but it was pretty rare. Like so many viruses, it causes headaches, body ac...
Send us a text Most people don’t even think twice when they get an infection. Much of the time, the best treatment is simple: fluids and rest. Bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics – a quick course of pills, maybe a week or 10 days, and you’re done. But the rise of drug-resistant pathogens is changing that. These germs (viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi) have developed the ability to survive even the strongest of antimicrobial drugs. This phenomenon is known as antimicrob...
Send us a text Rosemary Bartel had no idea her life was going to take a turn when she went to a hospital near her home in Chilton, Wisconsin in the United States for standard knee replacement surgery – her second such operation. She was ready to work hard to recover and return to her busy job at her Roman Catholic diocese. But Rosie developed an all-too-common infection known as MRSA—methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s one of the best-known examples of antimicrobial-resistant mi...
Send us a text Dr. Nour Shamas knows about antimicrobial resistance. As a clinical pharmacist, she was trained in how to dispense drugs to treat infections, and her graduate studies in global health policy made her aware of the threat of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. Antimicrobial resistance develops when bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites evolve the ability to shake off the effects of drugs developed to fight them. It’s one of the biggest threats to humanity – such a serious th...
Send us a text Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common, uncomfortable, and embarrassing. They can also be deadly. These infections of the kidneys, bladder, or urethra affect about 1 in 10 men in their lifetimes and more than half of women. Untreated UTIs can cause a body-wide infection known as sepsis. An estimated 236,000 people globally die every year from UTIs. Most UTIs are fairly easy to treat with antibiotics. However, a quarter to a third of urinary tract infections (UTIs) ar...
Send us a text No one wants to be exposed to air pollution. No one wants to raise their kids breathing in polluted air in their own neighborhoods. But in Austin, Texas, people of color are disproportionately forced to do both. Dr. Sarah Chambliss, a research associate in the Department of Population Health at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, led a team that ran a study of who is being affected by air pollution in Austin, neighborhood by neighborhood. They found that w...