The Centre for Pandemics and One-health Research (P1H) aims to conduct a series of interviews, “P1H Coffee Break”, with researchers to raise understanding and awareness regarding the field of pandemics and One-health.
What motivated you to do research on this topic?
I have been working on health information systems for the last 25 years in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. I realized that antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest threats we are facing in global health today. I wanted to make a difference and I saw that India is one of the hot spots for all these problems in terms of demand, production and consumption. We had already been working with the Indian government in many states for the last 20 years so we approached a few states asking if they would you be interested in our research in the domain of AMR. There is no visibility of the problems in terms of policy actions. That was the main motivation to contribute to solve a problem of such immense significance.
What is the aim of the research?
The aim is both conceptual and practical. Conceptually, we want to build a more multidisciplinary kind of perspective on how to understand the problem of AMR. This is primarily because the research has focused on looking at AMR as a biomedical problem to do with bacteria and pathogens. Our assumption is that it is not only a biomedical problem, but also a social and a lifestyle problem. Why do people consume a lot of antibiotics? What are their levels of literacy? What are cultural practices? These are all embedded deeply in the structure of health inequities. People who are marginalized, people who have little resources, who have little literacy, gender issues, etc. The conceptual aim is to try to build a multidisciplinary understanding of this problem and design interventions based on that.
There is also a practical or a policy dimension to the research. Which is strengthening public health systems, particularly through improved surveillance of the problem. These were the two main motivations.
Why is this topic important?
It is a global health threat. We are basically reaching a situation where antibiotics will not be effective anymore for various reasons. Such as overuse of antibiotics and no new antibiotics being produced for the last years. It is threatening the growth of modern medicine as we knew it. Anitibiotics are used for the healing process under for example c-section operations and infections. If antibiotics don't work anymore, then we are in serious trouble. There are many infections like Tuberculosis for example, that are becoming multi-drug resistant meaning that drugs are not working as well as they should.
These are existing infections but what about new novel infections which we don't know how to deal with. Which antibiotics are going to work? I think it is a significant global health problem with great consequences not only on medical care but also on for example lifestyles, social well-being, livelihoods, economics, social, and cultural aspects.
How are studies on pandemics or One Health related to your field of research?
It is directly related. In our current work we are focusing on human health, but that is inadequate. Human health is affected by environment, the food we eat, the animals we tend to, the water bodies which we use, the soil, domestic animals etc. Since we wanted to scope our problem and to understand better what the domain is, we focused only on human health.
Now we have put in other proposals to The Research Council of Norway and other places, where we are looking at environment health and environmental AMR. This by focusing on a river and contaminations in the river, which is being used by people for drinking water, washing clothes, children are playing in the water, and the animals grazing. These are direct sources of One-Health implications. We want to gradually build into a more radical or thorough sort of One-Health perspective
How would you describe your research in three words?
Multidisciplinary and the role digital technologies can have in terms of mitigation.
Thank you to Sundeep for participating in this interview. Check out our Instagram at @unioslo_cp1h to see snippets of the interview.