Shaun Kennedy

One Medicine One Science: a framework for exploring challenges at the intersection of animals, humans, and the environment.

Characterizing the health consequences of interactions among animals, humans, and the environment in the face of climatic change, environmental disturbance, and expanding human populations is a critical global challenge in todays world. Exchange of interdisciplinary knowledge in basic and applied sciences and medicine that includes scientists, health professionals, key sponsors, and policy experts revealed that relevant case studies of monkeypox, influenza A, tuberculosis, and HIV can be used to guide strategies for anticipating and responding to new disease threats such as the Ebola and Chickungunya viruses, as well as to improve programs to control existing zoonotic diseases, including tuberculosis. The problem of safely feeding the world while preserving the environment and avoiding issues such as antibiotic resistance in animals and humans requires cooperative scientific problem solving. Food poisoning outbreaks resulting from Salmonella growing in vegetables have demonstrated the need for knowledge of pathogen evolution and adaptation in developing appropriate countermeasures for prevention and policy development. Similarly, pesticide use for efficient crop production must take into consideration bee population declines that threaten the availability of the two‐thirds of human foods that are dependent on pollination. This report presents and weighs the objective merits of competing health priorities and identifies gaps in knowledge that threaten health security, to promote discussion of major public policy implications such that they may be decided with at least an underlying platform of facts.

One Medicine One Science

Characterizing the health consequences of interactions among animals, humans, and the environment in the face of climatic change, environmental disturbance, and expanding human populations is a critical global challenge in todays world. Exchange of interdisciplinary knowledge in basic and applied sciences and medicine that includes scientists, health professionals, key sponsors, and policy experts revealed that relevant case studies of monkeypox, influenza A, tuberculosis, and HIV can be used to guide strategies for anticipating and responding to new disease threats such as the Ebola and Chickungunya viruses, as well as to improve programs to control existing zoonotic diseases, including tuberculosis. The problem of safely feeding the world while preserving the environment and avoiding issues such as antibiotic resistance in animals and humans requires cooperative scientific problem solving. Food poisoning outbreaks resulting from Salmonella growing in vegetables have demonstrated the need for knowledge of pathogen evolution and adaptation in developing appropriate countermeasures for prevention and policy development. Similarly, pesticide use for efficient crop production must take into consideration bee population declines that threaten the availability of the two‐thirds of human foods that are dependent on pollination. This report presents and weighs the objective merits of competing health priorities and identifies gaps in knowledge that threaten health security, to promote discussion of major public policy implications such that they may be decided with at least an underlying platform of facts.

Why Can't We Test Our Way to Absolute Food Safety?

Efforts to ensure food safety must take into account long supply chains and unanticipated threats.

Assessing the continuum of event-based biosurveillance through an operational lens.

This research follows the Updated Guidelines for Evaluating Public Health Surveillance Systems, Recommendations from the Guidelines Working Group, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nearly a decade ago. Since then, models have been developed and complex systems have evolved with a breadth of disparate data to detect or forecast chemical, biological, and radiological events that have a significant impact on the One Health landscape. How the attributes identified in 2001 relate to the new range of event-based biosurveillance technologies is unclear. This article frames the continuum of event-based biosurveillance systems (that fuse media reports from the internet), models (ie, computational that forecast disease occurrence), and constructs (ie, descriptive analytical reports) through an operational lens (ie, aspects and attributes associated with operational considerations in the development, testing, and validation of the event-based biosurveillance methods and models and their use in an operational environment). A workshop was held in 2010 to scientifically identify, develop, and vet a set of attributes for event-based biosurveillance. Subject matter experts were invited from 7 federal government agencies and 6 different academic institutions pursuing research in biosurveillance event detection. We describe 8 attribute families for the characterization of event-based biosurveillance: event, readiness, operational aspects, geographic coverage, population coverage, input data, output, and cost. Ultimately, the analyses provide a framework from which the broad scope, complexity, and relevant issues germane to event-based biosurveillance useful in an operational environment can be characterized.

Advancing One Health Policy and Implementation Through the Concept of One Medicine One Science.

Numerous interspecies disease transmission events, Ebola virus being a recent and cogent example, highlight the complex interactions between human, animal, and environmental health and the importance of addressing medicine and health in a comprehensive scientific manner. The diversity of information gained from the natural, social, behavioral, and systems sciences is critical to developing and sustainably promoting integrated health approaches that can be implemented at the local, national, and international levels to meet grand challenges. The Concept of One Medicine One Science (COMOS) as outlined herein describes the interplay between scientific knowledge that underpins health and medicine and efforts toward stabilizing local systems using 2 linked case studies: the food system and emerging infectious disease. Forums such as the International Conference of One Medicine One Science (iCO-MOS), where science and policy can be debated together, missing pieces identified, and science-based collaborations formed among industry, governmental, and non-governmental policy makers and funders, is an essential step in addressing global health. The expertise of multiple disciplines and research foci to support policy development is critical to the implementation of one health and the successful achievement of global health security goals.

VASA: Interactive Computational Steering of Large Asynchronous Simulation Pipelines for Societal Infrastructure.

We present VASA, a visual analytics platform consisting of a desktop application, a component model, and a suite of distributed simulation components for modeling the impact of societal threats such as weather, food contamination, and traffic on critical infrastructure such as supply chains, road networks, and power grids. Each component encapsulates a high-fidelity simulation model that together form an asynchronous simulation pipeline: a system of systems of individual simulations with a common data and parameter exchange format. At the heart of VASA is the Workbench, a visual analytics application providing three distinct features: (1) low-fidelity approximations of the distributed simulation components using local simulation proxies to enable analysts to interactively configure a simulation run; (2) computational steering mechanisms to manage the execution of individual simulation components; and (3) spatiotemporal and interactive methods to explore the combined results of a simulation run. We showcase the utility of the platform using examples involving supply chains during a hurricane as well as food contamination in a fast food restaurant chain.

Defending the Safety of the Global Food System from Intentional Contamination in a Changing Market

Intentional contamination of the food supply poses a real and potentially catastrophic threat to society. Overall, it has the potential to result in disastrous and far-reaching effects, including direct morbidity and/or mortality, disruption of food distribution, loss of consumer confidence in government and the food supply, business failures, trade restrictions, and ripple effects on the economy. Key interrelated factors specific to food and the food system create this unusual vulnerability, both structural and social. The efficiency of the food system enables products derived from a wide range of global sources to be sourced, produced, and distributed rapidly due to the speed of national and global just-in-time supply chains. The food industry’s routine food safety measures are not designed to protect against high-impact deliberate contamination. When contamination occurs, identification of its nature and extent may take days, weeks, or even longer. Unintentional foodborne illness can further complicate recognition of intentional contamination events due to the delay in positive association of illnesses to the intentional event. The food/agriculture sector’s infrastructure must be strengthened to mitigate potential harm resulting from deliberate contamination, thereby making the food system less vulnerable to attack or destructive economic outcomes. New upward price pressures, declining economies, and constantly changing global trade along the food system supply chain have introduced a new urgency for greater diligence in food defense against deliberate contamination with either economic or terrorist motives. Initiatives include the development of specific countermeasures to minimize or eliminate vulnerabilities, as well as the development of practical solutions that enhance the capability to rapidly identify, contain, respond to, and recover from intentional contamination, both real and threatened. These activities must encompass the entire worldwide farm-to-table food system, from pre-farm inputs through retail sale, consumer food consumption, and public health system response.

State Officials’ Perceptions of the Food and Agriculture Sector Criticality Assessment Tool (FASCAT), Food-system Risk, and Food Defense Funding

Abstract Determining food system criticality is necessary to mitigate risks to the nation’s food supply and prioritize and allocate funding. The Food and Agriculture Sector Criticality Assessment Tool (FASCAT) is a tool used broadly by state governments to determine the criticality of food systems throughout the US State officials (SOs) responsible for food defense (n=32) were surveyed to determine whether FASCAT is of value to food defense and to determine SOs’ security beliefs, values, and practices related to food defense. Results indicated that: (1) SOs believe FASCAT is easier to use than other forms of risk assessment; (2) FASCAT training may have introduced bias into assessment of probability, threat, vulnerability, and consequences; (3) FASCAT is valuable to SOs; (4) SOs do not routinely follow security management best practices; (5) SOs believe that intentional biological threats to the food system are the most probable threats, though without supporting evidence; and (6) SOs believe food defense risk mitigation is not adequately funded by state or federal governments. These findings indicate that even though bias was potentially introduced to FASCAT assessments, SOs believe FASCAT has been useful to them in determining food system criticality. SOs indicate that more funding is needed from state and federal governments to adequately mitigate and manage food defense risks, and that they require more comprehensive training from food defense subject matter experts in threat assessment, risk mitigation, and security management to reduce the possibility of bias from FASCAT training.

Demeter's Resilience: an International Food Defense exercise.

The National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD), which is led by the University of Minnesota, hosted an international food defense exercise on 27 to 29 May 2008. Established in 2004, NCFPD is a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence with the mission of defending the food system through research and education. Tabletop exercises are practice-based scenarios intended to mimic real life experiences. The objective of the exercise discussed in this article was to facilitate discussion to increase awareness among exercise participants of both the threat that would be posed by an intentional attack on the food supply and the international impact of such an attack. Through facilitated discussion, exercise participants agreed on the following themes: (i) recognition of a foodborne disease outbreak is driven by the characteristics of the illness rather than the actual number of ill individuals; (ii) during the course of a foodborne outbreak there are generally multiple levels of communication; (iii) a common case definition for a foodborne disease is difficult to develop on a global scale; and (iv) the safety and health of all individuals is the number one priority of all parties involved. Several challenges were faced during the development of the exercise, but these were overcome to produce a more robust exercise. The following discussion will provide an overview of the challenges and the strategies used to overcome them. The lessons learned provide insight into how to plan, prepare, and host an international food defense exercise.

The science behind One Health: at the interface of humans, animals, and the environment

Humans face a grand quality‐of‐life challenge as growing demands for resources for an ever‐expanding population threaten the existence of wildlife populations, degrade land, and pollute air and water. Public investment and policy decisions that will shape future interactions of humans, animals, and the environment need scientific input to help find common ground for durable and sustainable success. The Second International Conference on One Medicine One Science brought together a broad range of scientists, trainees, regulatory authorities, and health experts from 34 countries to inform and discuss the human impacts of air quality; the complexities of water quality, access, and conflicts; the opportunities and uncertainties in precision medicine; and the role of science communication in health policy formulation. Workshops focused on the roles and development of physician–scientists and multidisciplinary teams in complex problem solving, Big Data tools for analysis and visualization, international policy development processes, and health models that benefit animals and humans. Key realizations were that local and regional health challenges at the interface of humans, animals, and the environment are variations of the same overarching conflicts and that international gatherings provide new opportunities for investigation and policy development that are broadly applicable.