2023-05-04 07:54:40
The European joint program “One Health EJP” in brief
- A duration of more than 5 years, from January 1, 2018 to September 30, 2023.
- 44 partners from 22 European countries: research organizations and health security agencies.
- Co-financed by the European framework program for research and innovation “Horizon
2020” and by the partners.
- Foreshadowed by the “MED-VET-NET” network of excellence, which aimed to bring together skills in veterinary science, public health and food safety at European level.
Three questions for Arnaud Callegari, coordinator of the One Health European Joint Program (EJP) within the European and International Affairs Department of ANSES
What was the objective of the One Health EJP program and what was ANSES’s involvement?
The core of the project was to put the One Health concept into practice. Today health risks have no borders, health issues must be understood in a more global way. The “One Health” approach aims to highlight the close links between human health, animal health and the environment, as well as the need to respond to them with a integrative and transversal between these three components.
The objective of the program was to acquire new knowledge regarding diseases called zoonoses, which can pass from animals to humans. The work of the EJP focused in particular on those transmissible through food, those presenting challenges with respect to antibiotic resistance and those that are emerging.
ANSES provided overall program coordination, working closely with the Belgian public health organization Sciensano to coordinate scientific activities. For this, it has used its experience acquired over the past two decades in the coordination of large-scale European research projects. The coordination team ensured the engineering of the program, ie its legal, administrative and financial management.
In terms of scientific contribution, the Agency, via several of its laboratories, has participated in 24 collaborative projects and 4 theses funded by the One Health EJP. She was the coordinator of six of these projects and theses.
Most of the research projects ended at the end of 2022, what remains to be done?
The year 2023 is dedicated to the evaluation of the results by an external scientific college and to their promotion, in particular through publications in scientific journals.
The results and knowledge are very rich: collections of bacterial strains, genome sequences of pathogens, detection methods, monitoring procedures, etc. The appropriation and use of these results by the various actors, national and European, will take time given the very wide scope of the project and the number and diversity of available productions.
The restitution to stakeholders of the scientific results of the EJP One Health has only just begun. A conference to present the main lessons of the program and discuss the challenges ahead in applying the One Health concept will be held in Brussels from June 19 to 21.
What was the contribution of the EJP in putting the One Health concept into practice?
The specificity of the EJP One Health is to have previously carried out an in-depth study of the specific research needs on a European scale, in close collaboration with the stakeholders, in order to be able to meet these needs. Thus, the objectives have been defined with food health risk assessors and managers, whether national, such as ministries, or European, such as EFSA (European Food Safety Authority), ECDC (European Center for the Prevention and disease control) or the EEA (European Environment Agency).
By putting the One Health concept into practice, the EJP One Health is one of those European public initiatives that have successfully brought together researchers from the fields of human health, food safety and animal health. It has also helped to raise community awareness of the “One Health” approach and the need to no longer work in silos but to ensure intersectoral collaboration to meet the health challenges of today and tomorrow. The example of the COVID-19 pandemic is the most recent and glaring illustration of this need. The institutionalization and operationalization of the One Health concept is underway, but changing the paradigm is a process that will not happen overnight!
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