One World, One Health

Send us Fan Mail
It’s a rare piece of good news. A single-dose dengue vaccine developed in Brazil as part of an international collaboration protected people against at least two strains of the virus for five years or longer, and did so safely. 
The vaccine was already being tested across Brazil and the findings helped boost confidence in its use. 
“This is a big deal,” says Dr. Andre Siqueira, Head of the Dengue Global Program at the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDI).  
Dr. Siqueira, who is also an Infectious Diseases Consultant at Brazil’s Instituto Nacional de Infectologia Evandro Chagas, a hospital that is part of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), helped develop the vaccine. He chatted with One World, One Health about the work in 2024. 
The new vaccine worked almost perfectly to keep people from being hospitalized with severe dengue symptoms, Dr. Siqueira and the team reported in Nature Medicine.  
That’s a big deal. Dengue can cause terrible symptoms, including severe abdominal pain, internal bleeding, severe muscle aches, and long term fatigue. From January 2025 to January 2026, dengue killed more than 4,000 people. 
The only other dengue vaccines currently available are a two-dose formula made by Japanese manufacturer Takeda and Sanofi’s Dengvaxia, which the company is discontinuing because of a lack of demand. 
In this episode, Siqueira updates host Maggie Fox about the latest findings on the new vaccine’s efficacy and its rollout in Brazil.

Send us Fan Mail
Imagine a life form identical to your own, only backwards.
At first, it would look normal. But just like when you try to use a mirror to read text on a page, it doesn’t quite translate. 
For some reason, all of the DNA of life on Earth is right-handed. The double helix of DNA that codes for all life on the planet spirals to the right – a quality called chirality. But, in theory, scientists could build cells based on DNA that spirals to the left. 
These mirror cells could defy some of the rules of biology. While it’s not clear how they might be useful, several labs sought to examine the possibility. Some of the U.S. scientists who took a look were startled by the implications and put together a team of 35 experts who studied the risks.
Mirror bacteria, in particular, scared them. Like an invasive plant that local animals don’t recognize as potential food, mirror bacteria could evade the immune systems of animals and people and cause life-threatening infections, they reported. They could wreak havoc on crops and even on entire ecosystems. The experts’ December 2024 report recommended halting all work on mirror cells.
In this One World, One Health episode, one member of that committee, Dr. Jassi Pannu, explains some of what the team found. Dr. Pannu is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Listen as she chats with host Maggie Fox about the potential risks of mirror bacteria and how scientists must voluntarily stop this research.

Send us Fan Mail
Imagine this scene:
A family’s house was destroyed when it was bombed during a war. They got out with the clothes on their backs – nothing more. When they were fleeing, the mother was hit with fragments from another bomb. It tore off part of her leg. Dirt got in the wound.
They made it to a refugee camp, but the wound got infected. With nothing available to treat the injury, the infection got worse. She had a drug-resistant infection that wasn’t treatable with regular antibiotics. Her entire leg and part of her hip had to be removed to save her life. She will have a physical disability for the rest of her life.
This is just one story of drug resistance or antimicrobial resistance (AMR)  and the impact of armed conflict. Report after report finds that victims of armed conflict and refugees – both those seeking shelter abroad and inside their own countries – are especially likely to suffer from drug-resistant infections.
Dr. Aula Abbara, Consultant in Infectious Diseases and Acute Medicine and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at Imperial College, London, has been studying the problem firsthand.
She’s worked with teams that found people injured in Syria’s 15-year-long conflict not only suffered terrible wounds, but then developed worse infections because of crowded and unsanitary conditions in healthcare facilities. These war-damaged hospital laboratories in Syria, especially, lacked the capacity to test for drug-resistant bacteria, and so doctors didn’t know which antibiotics to prescribe to treat patients’ infections.
Solutions require taking a One Health approach, Dr. Abbara and colleagues have found.
She and her colleagues call for programs to bring in more health professionals and healthcare access; introduction of easy-to-use diagnostics so people’s infections can be immediately diagnosed and thus treated with the correct drugs; stopping the improper use and distribution of antibiotics; and proper surveillance so that professionals know which drug-resistant infections are spreading and where.
In this episode of One World, One Health, Dr. Abbara chats with host Maggie Fox about what she’s seen and what might help.

Send us Fan Mail
Having a baby should be safe. Yet it’s far too often a death sentence for both the mother and the baby. An estimated 260,000 women died in 2023 during and right after giving birth, and those numbers will have risen with the loss of United States global aid dollars.
There are ways to improve this – better prenatal care is an obvious one. According to the World Health Organization, women giving birth most often die from severe bleeding, infections, or other complications. Pregnant women also die from high blood pressure or from unsafe abortions or complications of miscarriage.
If women can get the right medical care during pregnancy, delivery, and after childbirth, the risk of death plummets. But doctors and nurses can be scarce, especially in lower-income countries. Women also often fear going to hospitals or clinics, mistrust them, or simply lack the money to make use of them. 
A much easier solution is a properly trained midwife. The International Confederation of Midwives supports groups that train and advocate for midwives, who can help ensure safe births.
Some countries even have programs to train and license midwives. Professor Doreen Kaura of the University of the Western Cape in Belville, South Africa heads one such program. She also conducts research into the effects of midwifery practice.
Not only can well-trained midwives provide high-level medical care for pregnant and delivering women, but they can take into account cultural beliefs and practices that earn trust and ensure that women show up for the lifesaving care they need, Kaura has found. “Respectful care is not optional,” she says.
Listen here as she tells One World, One Health about the benefits of midwives and how they can save both lives and money.

Send us Fan Mail
Fighting climate change can feel like a hopeless battle. Who can take on the giant fossil fuel companies when governments are not even bothering? How can countries act when every day temperatures rise, superstorms flood coastal areas, droughts devastate crops, and weather patterns bring insects and new diseases to areas previously spared?
But there is something powerful and important that each and every resident of this planet can do to improve the health of the planet and at the same time improve their own health: eat better.
A new report from the EAT-Lancet Commission lays out just how to do it and it details the benefits of what it calls the Planetary Health Diet. The current way people produce food contributes 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions that are driving the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere, the report notes – and that in turn is causing the increasing disruption of weather systems. Even if the entire world stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, if people keep producing food the way they do now, global warming would continue.
But a change in the way people eat can help stop it, and according to the commission, it would not be difficult or unpleasant.
The mostly plant-based diet the experts recommend would not be a radical departure from how many people around the world eat now and it is based on what research shows would reduce rates of the biggest killers of people in most high-income countries and increasingly in low- and middle-income countries – heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It would mean eating mostly whole grains; fruits; vegetables; legumes, such as beans; tubers, such as sweet potatoes; and cutting out added fats and sugars. People could still eat some meat and dairy if they wanted to, but variety should replace ultra-processed foods.
This change in diet would drive a change in agriculture that would slow the destruction of forests that in turn could reduce pollution from burning and return biodiversity that nurtures a healthier environment, the report says. And moving away from intensive livestock farming could help stop the conditions that have fueled the rise of antimicrobial resistance – so-called drug-resistant superbugs – that evolve when farmers feed antibiotics to their animals.
In this episode, Dr. Patrick Webb, Professor of Food and Nutrition Economics, Policy, and Programs at Tufts University in Boston and an EAT-Lancet Commissioner, explains some of the ideas behind the report and why food is medicine, both for humanity and for the planet.