One Health & Sustainability (OH-Sustain)

The research group for One Health & Sustainability (OH-Sustain) is engaged in transdisciplinary research and education, One Health initiatives, contingency work, and public outreach. The group aims to promote sustainability with a particular focus on systems in which animals are kept and used for food production. The overarching approach is systems oriented, meaning that systems thinking is used in several of the projects that OH-Sustain group members participate in.

Some parts of our research and project activities are inspired by frameworks such as the Planetary Boundaries Framework from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the concept of absolute sustainability and new holistic ways of approaching sustainability in our modern societies (e.g. Wellbeing Economics). Rather than focusing mainly on optimising efficiency or the value of one or a few aspects of food production, the broad spectrum of effects and relations in the food production systems should be understood to obtain a sustainable future in which modern food production systems play a major role. This implies investigations of alternative food production methods, rethinking of future scenarios and integrated research based on mixed disciplines, e.g. veterinary and animal science working in close collaboration and exchanging staff with anthropology and ethnography as done in the Cattle Crossroads project.

Other parts of our research and services focus on epidemiological and data-analytic approaches to understanding antimicrobial use and spread of zoonotic diseases in livestock populations, as well as the legislative and communicative development and challenges related to these. We contribute to improving monitoring systems and assist colleagues in data acquisition (e.g. in the project VetStat-Kvæg) and disease control systems (e.g. the Danish Salmonella Dublin surveillance and control programme). We also work on understanding the effect of biosecurity and management decisions on farms (e.g. in the EU-Horizon project BIOSECURE and for the Salmonella Dublin working group under the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration). We collaborate with researchers, specialists and practitioners at the veterinary authorities, the livestock sector, farmers and with other research groups at University of Copenhagen and other universities.

 

We aim to ensure that the research, education and outreach work carried out by the OH-Sustain researchers have an impact on the full spectrum of the One Health domains, and we therefore keep in mind the definition and strive to support the key underlying principles of One Health published by the One Health High Level Expert Panel and supported by FAO, WOAH, WHO and UNEP, in PLoS Pathogens, 2022, One Health: A new definition for a sustainable and healthy future:

“One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals, and ecosystems. It recognizes the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent.
The approach mobilizes multiple sectors, disciplines, and communities at varying levels of society to work together to foster well-being and tackle threats to health and ecosystems, while addressing the collective need for healthy food, water, energy, and air, taking action on climate change and contributing to sustainable development.

Key underlying principles including

  • equity between sectors and disciplines;
  • sociopolitical and multicultural parity (the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities) and inclusion and engagement of communities and marginalized voices;
  • socioecological equilibrium that seeks a harmonious balance between human–animal–environment interaction and acknowledging the importance of biodiversity, access to sufficient natural space and resources, and the intrinsic value of all living things within the ecosystem;
  • stewardship and the responsibility of humans to change behavior and adopt sustainable solutions that recognize the importance of animal welfare and the integrity of the whole ecosystem, thus securing the well-being of current and future generations; and
  • transdisciplinarity and multisectoral collaboration, which includes all relevant disciplines, both modern and traditional forms of knowledge and a broad representative array of perspectives.

 

 

 

 

Presentation  at the annual Cattle conference in Herning

Ph.d. fellow Jeanette Kristensen will give a presentation to farmers and others interested at the annual Cattle conference in Herning. The presentation will be in Danish and will be about preliminary results from her field study where she has visited veal calf producers in Denmark to interview them and observe and discuss practices around antimicrobial use in their farms.
Ph.d. studerende Jeanette Kristensen giver oplæg om sine foreløbige feltprojektresultater fra besøg i slagtekalvebesætninger på Kvægkongressen i Herning, mandag den 26. februar 2024.

Oplægget hedder ’Kendetegn ved slagtekalveproduktioner med højt og lavt antibiotikaforbrug’

Veterinary School communication prize anno 2023

Associate professor and curator Nathalia Brichet won the Veterinary School communication prize anno 2023. The prize was announced during the New Year’s cure on the 10th of January 2024. The communication prize went to Nathalia for her widely popular dissemination of research from the Veterinary School through the exhibition "Production animals: a gallery for the art of the possible". Congratulations!!

We are happy to know that the exhibition in the room upstairs from our offices are frequently have visitors with very diverse backgrounds who come here to learn about and discuss animal farming in Denmark: https://kunet.ku.dk/nyhedsrum/nyheder/Sider/vetschool-nytaarskur-jan-2024.aspx

Veterinary students’ teaching prize 2023

Assistant professor Camilla Kirketerp Nielsen and Professor Liza Rosenbaum Nielsen won the veterinary students’ teaching prize 2023 for their work on implementing sustainability and green transition in livestock farming into a course for last year veterinary students in the One Health and Herd Health tracks. This is a great achievement that would not have happened without the inspiration and support from the Cattle Crossroads project. The prize is called “Saly’s Horse” and was handed out during the annual student party ‘Smediefesten’ on the 26th of May 2023.

’Focus on One Health’

Liza Rosenbaum Nielsen was speaker at the opening seminar for a new One Health Institute at University of Zurich, Switzerland on the 21st of September 2023. She now serves as member of the advisory board for the new center.

 

 

 

Respiratory health consequences of living close to livestock farms

The Cattle Crossroads project

VetStat-Kvæg

BIOSECURE

NEXTCAP and NETCAP-DIP

NEOH / Ecohealth International

COST Action ‘Biosecurity Enhanced Through Training Evaluation and Raising Awareness’ (BETTER)

Salmonella Dublin DK-Vet project (2022-2025): In this project, we have performed a case-control field study in more than 100 Danish dairy farms and are analysing the data to identify risk factors and biosecurity practices associated with the introduction and establishment of S. Dublin in test-negative dairy herds in areas with a non-negligible exposure risk. We also collaborate with the TIPTON research group on data, and design and interpretation of their models to investigate network properties over time between cattle farms in Denmark and to quantify the infection probability by considering different transmission pathways as well as a Salmonella Dublin spread model for Denmark. We will work on investigating the impact of different mitigation measures to reduce the prevalence of S. Dublin in the cattle population by considering already existing implemented mitigation measures. In this project we work together with SEGES Innovation APS, DTU and the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration.