SPH T&L session: Adventures on the silk road: teaching One Health in China

Speaker 

 Associate Professor Simon Reid, School of Public Health, The University of Queensland

Overview

This covers the evolution of the intensive course PUBH7031 One Health: disease at the human-animal interface and in particular the pedagogical transformation that occurred when we taught it for the first time in China.

Maxine Whittaker and I recently delivered PUBH7031 One Health: disease at the human-animal interface as a 4-day workshop in collaboration with Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, which is a large city associated with the emergence of SARS and a number of zoonotic avian influenza strains. This course provides students with an opportunity to gain an understanding of systems thinking and how it can be applied to zoonotic disease management.  Teaching the course in China required a bit of a re-think in terms of the course content, especially as the local organisers insisted that we include a “field trip” to the local live animal market. The field trip was an unexpected bonus because it completely changed the course and lead to much higher level outcomes. I will present the “story” of this change and show some of the “interesting” sights and smells that provided Maxine and I with a learning experience that almost matched that of the students.

Bio

Associate Professor Simon Reid is a keen advocate of One Health, which is an emerging international field of research and practice integrating human, animal and ecosystem health to address health hazards at the human-animal-ecosystem interface. His formal training was in Veterinary Medicine and a PhD in parasitology/epidemiology. His main interests are in research to improve the control of infectious diseases with a particular emphasis on zoonoses such as leptospirosis in both the animal and human hosts. He spent time working as part of the FAO program to manage Avian Influenza in Indonesia and Vietnam and later served as the leader of the Surveillance and Operational Research team in the Public Health Division of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community. He runs a successful course teaching the principles of One Health as part of the MPH program at UQ and in 2015 at Sun Yat-sen University in China.

Date          

Tuesday, 15 March 2016

Time         

1:00pm – 2:00pm

Location  

Room 113, Public Health Building, Herston