Stef Stienstra
Royal Dutch Navy, Netherlands
Title: The importance of a one health bio-surveillance system in public health and pandemic defence
Biography
Biography: Stef Stienstra
Abstract
One Health is global and has to be respected as the biggest threats are the emerging zoonotic diseases. We will encounter more often the biothreats as we travel more and with an increasing dense population f the world, the spread of infectious diseases goes faster and over a bigger area. The recent outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 is a an example of an emerging pathogen, which has spread all over the world. This nasty virus is discovered in humans almost two years ago and has created a lot of fear and economic damage.
It is of utmost importance to do research on the new emerging contagious diseases and to keep biosafety and biosecurity well organised in the laboratories where this research is done. To train the biothreat awareness and biological management is very important.
Tools to monitor, detect and identify the threat of new emerging zoonotic diseases is getting more important together with diagnostic tools for the diagnosis of the victims of new pandemic causing pathogens.
Classical microbiological identification techniques are too slow or unspecific for prompt reaction on an outbreak of an new emerging disease, which is at that moment unknown. To detect ‘pathogenicity islands’ in a virus or bacterium is more important in this phase than to identify the organism. The zoonotic micro-organism most probably is mutated naturally or in a laboratory and therefor not identifiable with existing ‘classical’ techniques.
New gene-extraction techniques and new analysers, which give a kind of fingerprint of the threat, are developed and these new techniques will be important to monitor the safety of the environment.