Food Security And One Health For The Future Workshop

The Youth Cafe, in partnership with Foraus, is working on a project to promote One Health and food security in East Africa. The One Health for The Future project is being implemented with the support of The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and efforts to reach other partners from the East African region are still underway. This is to ensure the region is well equipped to prepare and mitigate crises such as COVID-19 in the future.

It is believed that one of the reasons why this pandemic hit the world as hard was due to unpreparedness. Pandemics can occur across many sectors, not just health. Therefore, projects like this conduct research, educate, and build people's capacities in the region to assess risks and mitigate them to prevent a crisis. By doing so, the effects of a pandemic are not experienced as harshly as they would have if the people were not prepared.

One Health as a concept first appeared in 2004, when a coalition of global health experts laid its foundations with the so-called “Manhattan principles,” setting the agenda for fifteen years of advocacy by several academic and non-profit organizations.

The project aims to foster more effective and forward-looking prevention, combat epidemic/epizootic diseases and maintain ecosystem integrity. Over the course of the past years, these principles were updated to include additional considerations on pathogen spillover, climate change, and antimicrobial resistance (called the “Berlin principles”).

Based on the latest definition of One Health provided by the One Health High-Level Expert Panel, it is an integrated approach aiming to sustainably balance and optimize the health of ecosystems, humans, and animals.

The Youth Cafe in itself has eight primary focus areas, and Universal Health Coverage and Environmental Conservation and Climate Change are some of them. The organization provides educational opportunities on health and environmental issues to young people.

In addition, the organization advocates for creating more green jobs and collaborative platforms where young people can converse and come up with solutions for issues related to One Health. Given the similarity in the works of The Youth Cafe and Foraus, this partnership endeavour is going to be a success.

There are four scenarios or sectors that Foraus and The Youth Cafe are focusing on, namely, zoonoses, food safety and security threats, and Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR).

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites change over time and no longer respond to medicines making infections harder to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, and death. As a result of drug resistance, antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines become ineffective, and infections become increasingly difficult or impossible to treat.

Food safety and security touch upon the relationship between agri-food systems and their impact on the environment and human health. Increased demand for food has already strained natural resources resulting in soil erosion, loss of biodiverse landscapes, and pollution of the environment all around the world, presenting new challenges in food safety and sustainable food production.

Zoonosis is an infectious disease that is transmitted from animals to humans. Zoonotic pathogens can be bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature or may also involve unconventional agents. Their transmission to humans occurs through direct contact with food, water, or the environment.

Zoonoses represent a significant public health challenge worldwide due to our close interactions with animals in agriculture, as companions, and in the natural environment. Indeed, WHO estimates that most known human infectious diseases and about 75% of newly emerging infections originate from animals.

On this account, a workshop is being organized on the 6th of October 2022, where participants will learn and interact with each other on the three sectors the project focuses on.

More information on the project and the workshop can be found on the workshop page. The workshop page is on The Policy Kitchen. Upon clicking the link, you will be redirected to the project page, where there is a green button you can click to enrol in the workshop. The enrollment will only require your name and email address. Enrollment of participants is still ongoing but will be closed soon. It is therefore essential that all that are interested apply as soon as possible.