National Consortium for One Health Launched in Shanghai

On August 27, 2021, Shanghai Chongming Island saw the opening ceremony raise its curtain of "Chongming World-Class Eco-Island Construction and One Health Development Forum", which was jointly organized by the Chongming District Government, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and SJTU School of Medicine.

At the opening ceremony, the Chongming Base of SJTU One Health Center was unveiled and the National Consortium for One Health launched. The proposals to set up the research institutions have been promoted intentionally to help to resolve the difficulties in dealing with extraordinary circumstances and to improve the ecological and health situations. China has been lauded for putting forward the initiatives of building “a community with a shared future for mankind” and “a community of human and natural life” in face of the global challenges, such as COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. And, in recent years, problems such as emerging infectious diseases and food safety, extreme weather patterns, loss of biodiversity, and increasing desertification have struck frequently, posing severe issues to human survival and societal development.

Taking these as their missions, after more than a year of deliberation, some experts on One Health from all over China proactively involved themselves in establishing the National Consortium for One Health, with the Center being the hub. After the Consortium launched, scientists engaged in it will prioritize their expeditious efforts to find reasonable solutions to certain complex problems on ecology and health, from a holistic “human-animal-environment” perspective and through multi-agency, interdisciplinary, and cross-regional collaborations.

Information on humans, animals, and the environment in a unified manner will be collected and analyzed into big databases to provide comprehensive prevention and control responses to infectious diseases so that early warning of them, be the newly emerging or reemerging ones, can be made available, hence an improved effectiveness of the public health governance system for epidemics and pandemics.

The leadership from different institutions attended the opening ceremony, e.g., Chongming District Government, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, SJTU-UoE One Health Center, Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission, Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Environment, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and China Medical Board of the United States as well as more than 50 scholars from various universities and research institutions all over China.

International organizations such as WHO, FAO, UNICEF-UNEP-World Bank-WHO Spatial Programs for Research and Training on Tropical Diseases have presented video-clip congratulations. Chief representative of the China Medical Board of the United States delivered an in-person congratulatory address at the ceremony, fully affirming the significance of one-health research and expressing a willing of support for the future activities.

Chongming Island is an important ecological protective zone of Shanghai, and it is of particular significance to the ecological environment and ecological safety of the Yangtze Delta and the Yangtze River Basin. Its development into a world-class ecological island is inseparable from the structured integration of the environment, animal, and human health.

The One Health approach focuses on the "blind spots" and "difficulties" existing interactively among the sciences of medicine, veterinary and environment, and on the solutions to the complex health problems at the interface of people-animal-environment.

On May 8 in 2020, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Edinburgh jointly established the SJTU-UoE One Health Center. Infectious diseases, food safety, and antimicrobial resistance have been made the intervening dimensions to build an interdisciplinary and cross-regional research platform on One Health for accommodating the integration of new technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing into One Health study, and to establish a cloud laboratory for detecting, collecting, monitoring, transforming, assessing and governing the data interactively generated from humans, animals and the environment.

The Center’s research interests are in accordance with the pressing needs from all the continents, currently including antimicrobial resistance and resource development, food safety and nutrition development, impact of global climate change on health, zoonotic disease prevention and control, emergency management of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, communication and public behavior, laws and regulations and policies, and big data on One Health.

In the future, the scientists will also attach great importance to monitoring food-borne diseases, ecological and health restoration, environment and disease transmission, environmental and humanitarian disasters, biodiversity conservation, environmental change and insect migration, environmental and animal diseases, and biosafety protection.

The establishment of the National Consortium on One Health signifies that those scientists, experts and scholars across both China and the world will be taking actions to coordinate and mobilize all possible forces to bolster up researches on One Health, including its theories, technologies, laws, governance mechanism, international collaborations, and industrial applications, and hence to look into modeling One Health system.

Bring into being a cross-sector, cross-disciplinary, cross-regional, and coordinated governance mechanism, and transforming the institutional governance advantages into its effectiveness are the essentials for scaling up the newly launched research projects on One Health in Chongming Island.