November 3, 2016

White Dog and the White Dog Army believe that humans, the four-leggeds and all life on this planet are connected in a web. What happens to one group or species affects us all…damage to the environment, the growth of disease vectors, the eureka moments of understanding and insight.

Today is One Health Day around the world.

The goal of One Health Day is to bring attention around the world to the need for One Health interactions and for the world to ‘see them in action’. The One Health Day campaign is designed to engage as many individuals as possible from as many arenas as possible in One Health education and awareness events, and to generate an inspiring array of projects worldwide.

One Health is the collaborative effort of multiple health science professions, together with their related disciplines and institutions – working locally, nationally, and globally – to attain optimal health for people, domestic animals, wildlife, plants, and our environment.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is at the core of the One Health concept. And the One Health Day logo captures this well. A white and a blue cross-like figure (note that crosses are widely recognized as healthcare symbols) are intertwined to form eight different yet connected circles, each of them representing a key discipline under the One Health Umbrella:

•             Human medicine

•             Veterinary medicine

•             Environmental health

•             Ecology

•             Public health

•             Molecular and microbiology

•             Health economics

•             Translational medicine

One Health is the legacy from which the Building Bridges To Cures mission of our nonprofit organization, Paws To People derives. It is from these interconnections that translational medicine, veterinarians,  environmentalists, science and engineering unite to share information that will unlock the secrets to defeating 1513 diseases (University of Sidney, 2016) that animals on this planet and humans are both afflicted with. There are nearly 400 diseases that dogs and humans share including cancer, diabetes, glaucoma, dementia. There are FIFTEEN  illnesses that Japanese Quail can help in modeling the human versions.

We ask you to join us today in embracing the idea of a unified fight against disease and the promotion of One Health. Paws to People was founded because too many of our friends and loved ones were taken too soon by diseases we CAN defeat if we join paws, hands, fins, wings, and minds to build Bridges.