Our fourth symposium was held on 12–13 December 2018 in Wellington.
The aim of the One Health Aotearoa symposiums is to bring together infectious diseases scientists and professionals from the fields of human, animal and environmental health in order to address priority One Health issues.
The symposium included sessions on emerging infectious diseases, mahinga kai and mātauranga Māori, water quality, One Health economics and antimicrobial resistance.
The four plenary speakers were Alison Mather (Quadram, UK), Colleen Lau (Australian National University), Garth Harmsworth (Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research) and Ross Thompson (University of Canberra).
Alison is an epidemiologist who studies the evolution, origins and transmission of bacteria between different host populations, using a combination of approaches from epidemiology, ecology and genomics. Her particular research focus is on bacteria that are resistant to antimicrobial drugs, and in understanding the relative contributions of animals, humans, the environment and food to the overall burden of bacterial disease and antimicrobial resistance.
Ross is a freshwater ecologist with interests in the study of biodiversity and the restoration of landscapes. His fundamental research is in food web ecology; seeking the rules that determine how natural communities assemble and persist. His applied research addresses the ways in which food webs can be influenced by anthropogenic factors including urbanisation, land clearance, pharmaceutical contamination, river flow diversion and restoration, and invasion. He has an active research program on aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem function in urban and rural landscapes.
Colleen is a clinician with expertise in travel medicine and tropical medicine. Her research interests include infectious disease epidemiology, emerging infectious diseases, environmental health, spatial epidemiology, travel vaccinations, malaria prophylaxis, tropical medicine, and the impact of global environmental change on infectious diseases.
Garth’s background is in land resource mapping and assessment, GIS applications and environmental databases, and indigenous values and knowledge research.