The University of Guelph is launching a new institute dedicated to creating a learning environment with a multidisciplinary approach.
Approved by the U of G senate, The One Health Institute will team researchers across disciplines on U of G’s campuses as well as campuses of their external partners, Western University and McMaster University to tackle complex health issues.
“One Health is an opportunity to study the health of people, the health of animals and the health of the environment and the intersection of all those,” says interim director of the One Health Institute, Cate Dewey.
“We’re not only building research teams across disciplines on this campus but we’re bringing in faculty from medical schools at those two campuses to be able to have these One Health research projects.”
Dewey says while complicated health diseases arise, it is important to look at the relationships between the environment, animals and humans to understand how to tackle them locally as well as globally.
For example, Dewey says if you study the environment in relation to Lyme disease, you will notice that the change in climate is what enabled ticks to move northward and so the environment plays a large role in Lyme disease affecting domestic animals as well as people.
“Diseases can be transferred from people to animals and animals to people. We know 70 per cent of new emerging diseases in people come from animals,” says Dewey.
“So now we’re understanding why it's so important to look at all three together.”
In the past, Dewey says researchers often studied health in silos and so people didn't particularly study external factors such as the environment or social determinants of health such as poverty.
She says by combining at least two of these disciplines, the study is considered a One Health study.
“It's not one health if you're studying something in its silo. So if you're studying diabetes only in people, that would not be considered one health,” says Dewey.
Dewey says while several faculty members at the U of G are at engaged in at least a component part in the research or teaching in One Health because of the university’s ongoing approach of One Health over the years, this is the first time the university is bringing these people together and will have an institute specifically dedicated for it so it can reap the benefits of a multidisciplinary approach.
Dewey says she has been working on One Health on the campus for 13 years and the university has used is as an interdisciplinary approach to tackle for several courses.
She is currently in the midst of designing a graduate and undergraduate One Health program aimed to launch Jan 2020 and September 2020 respectively.
“We're expecting it will be the most flexible undergrad health degree in Canada,” says Dewey.
She says students usually pursue a health degree with particular interests in mind such as public health and are interested in going to medical or veterinary school and then there are people who are particularly interested in policy because they're political science students.
She says The One Health program is a good option for them because they will be taking courses in multiple disciplines.
“If you think about that science student, they will be taking at least one course in policy, they will be taking a course in communications, they will be taking a course in social determinant of health probably from sociology, and so they will graduate with a much broader understanding of health as opposed to specifically the physiology,” says Dewey.
She says students will learn to work across disciplines and learn how to build teams and learn to use not only their discipline but listen to and understand others so they can work as a team together.
The new institute will include researches across U of G colleges with new programs in the works in the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC), the College of Biological Science (CBS) and the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences (CSAHS).
The University will expand the program by hiring new faculty members including a member in CBS to manage the One Health undergraduate degree program and Canada Research Chairs assigned in the OVC and CSAHS.
It also intends to include joint funding proposals for major health research grants, global academic partnerships and global outreach possibility and co-op programs for students to experience experiential learning with different organizations.
