Geisha Kow­lessar

Most Caribbean coun­tries are heav­i­ly de­pen­dent on tourism but this re­sults in a high lev­el of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to glob­al eco­nom­ic re­ces­sion, pub­lic health threats, in­clud­ing out­breaks of in­fec­tious and food-borne dis­eases, as well as en­vi­ron­men­tal threats and nat­ur­al dis­as­ters.

Mak­ing the state­ment yes­ter­day was PA­HO/WHO coun­try rep­re­sen­ta­tive Dr Bernadette Theodore-Ghan­di at yes­ter­day's launch of a two-day sem­i­nar of the Caribbean Sub-Re­gion­al Work­shop, "One Health: Form Ideas to Ac­tion", at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain."Some dri­vers of emerg­ing in­fec­tious dis­eases at the hu­man-an­i­mal-en­vi­ron­ment in­ter­face in­clude cat­a­stroph­ic nat­ur­al events, such as hur­ri­canes and earth­quakes, habi­tat dis­rup­tion from agri­cul­tur­al prac­tices, cli­mate change, con­sump­tion of food and wa­ter and the move­ment of peo­ple, an­i­mal and goods," Theodore-Ghan­di said.

For ex­am­ple, she added, the up­surge in lep­tospiro­sis in an­i­mals and the Caribbean was re­lat­ed to an in­crease in the rat pop­u­la­tion, usu­al­ly cou­pled with flood­ing."The caus­es of the rat pop­u­la­tion ex­plo­sion are prob­a­bly re­lat­ed to avail­abil­i­ty of food, habi­tat and per­haps di­min­ished ro­dent con­trol mea­sures," Theodore-Ghan­di added.She said a "one health" com­plex analy­sis of the root cause and con­tribut­ing fac­tors would help to de­sign a mul­ti-faceted de­tec­tion, pre­ven­tion and re­sponse plan. "One health" has pro­posed an in­ter­na­tion­al, in­ter-dis­ci­pli­nary ap­proach to sur­veil­lance, mon­i­tor­ing, pre­ven­tion, con­trol and mi­gra­tion of emerg­ing dis­eases as well as en­vi­ron­men­tal con­ser­va­tion.

Theodore-Ghan­di said in that vein, cul­tur­al con­texts of health and an­i­mal dis­ease and ecosys­tems fac­tors must be con­sid­ered to for­mu­late holis­tic strate­gies for dis­ease de­tec­tion, pre­ven­tion and re­sponse.In­equity and in­equal­i­ty con­tin­ued to af­fect large seg­ments of the glob­al pop­u­la­tion as about one bil­lion peo­ple world­wide were un­der­nour­ished and a larg­er num­ber suf­fer the con­se­quence of ex­ces­sive or un­bal­anced en­er­gy con­sump­tion, Theodore-Ghan­di al­so not­ed."This con­sti­tutes a ma­jor risk fac­tor for dis­abil­i­ties, ill­ness­es and death from chron­ic mal­nu­tri­tion and non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases," she added.In or­der to sat­is­fy food re­quire­ments for the grow­ing hu­man pop­u­la­tion glob­al agri­cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion must in­crease by 70 per cent by the year 2050, Theodore-Ghan­di said."It is im­por­tant to en­sure that this in­crease is achieved with­out en­vi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion," she added.