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The Rx One Health Field Institute is a groundbreaking experiential learning program that brings together One Health professionals from around the globe. The 2024 cohort included participants from 14 countries (and five continents), representing a broad spectrum of disciplines such as veterinary medicine, nutrition, public health, wildlife conservation, and laboratory sciences. The program provided a unique platform for these professionals to collaborate, exchange knowledge, and develop interdisciplinary solutions to complex health challenges.

Jessicah Kurere is a Kenyan veterinarian working with Vetinwild and Ewaso Lions with special interest in disease surveillance at the interface between domestic and wild carnivores in Northern Kenya.

I am from a pastoralist community and we have a lot of livestock. We live in a very rural area so there is a lot of livestock and scarce resources including access to veterinary services. So I am one of the very few veterinarians coming from my local area. That was my passion - to support my community.

Alejandro Mena is a veterinarian and pursuing a PhD in Public Health with a One Health focus at the Emerging Pathogens Institute from the Department of Environmental & Global Health, University of Florida.

Maddie McNelis is pursuing a PhD at UC Santa Cruz, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, studying maternal care and lactation in wildlife.

I wanted to be a veterinarian for my whole life and then got to college. Then decided i wanted to be a doctor, then decided maybe not actually. I fell in love with wildlife biology but didn’t really see myself in biology for awhile. I didn’t really have access to the type of people that I felt similar to until I started doing fieldwork. 

Jennie leads Rx One Health Field Institute activities and is a field veterinarian with the One Health Institute. She provides technical and logistical support to a variety of projects including the USAID One Health Workforce-Next Generation project.Leading RxOH is one of her favorite things about her job and she loves watching people discover the joys of seeing the natural world and becoming inspired stewards of our amazing planet.

Marcela Uhart, is an Argentinian veterinarian and Director of the Latin America Program at the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center. Her research spans across a variety of topics, including: infectious and parasitic diseases, zoonotic pathogens, pollutants (e.g. plastics), biotoxins, antimicrobial resistance, physiology, ecology, and health risks from human interactions.

The Wildlife Health Youth Fellowship was first launched in 2022-2023 as an inaugural recipient of our One Health DEI Competitive Grants Program. After a successful pilot year, we are so pleased to see this fellowship continue to break barriers and help make wildlife health education accessible for all!

Our California Raptor Center (CRC) team had to say goodbye to Apollo, one of their American Kestrel educational ambassador birds. Due to an old severe right wing injury, he had chronic shoulder problems that eventually became more painful and started to drastically impact his quality of life. The team had to make the difficult decision to humanely euthanize him.

The Guidelines for Addressing Disease Risks in Wildlife Trade have officially been released by the World Organisation for Animal Health. These guidelines are the product of an ad hoc committee convened during the pandemic lockdown in response to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Our Latin America Program director Dr. Marcy Uhart was part of the committee that drafted and finalized this report with input from representatives in various sectors worldwide.

Cows and at least one person in the U.S. have been sickened by avian influenza. OHI's Dr. Christine Kreuder Johnson is one of the experts recently interviewed on Scientific American's podcast "Science, Quickly" to discuss the risk to humans.

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Host Dave Schlom investigates the world of vultures and condors with Michelle Hawkins, the Director of the UC Davis California Raptor Center.

One of the most underappreciated bird families, vultures around the planet perform vital roles in ecosystems, eating the remains of dead animals and tidying up the natural world!

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Congratulations to the OHI's Dr. Kirsten Gilardi for receiving the James H. Meyer Distinguished Achievement Award from UC Davis. This award honors and recognizes her lifetime dedication to the health of wildlife, people, and the planet!

Q: What led you to wildlife veterinary medicine?

Happy International Women's Day! Today we honor Dr. Tierra Smiley Evans, research faculty here at the One Health Institute at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and Chief Veterinary & Scientific Officer of Gorilla Doctors who received a Seed Grant for International Activities from UC Davis Global Affairs to study the microbiome of mountain gorillas.

The highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 has adapted to spread between birds and marine mammals, posing an immediate threat to wildlife conservation, according to a study from the University of California, Davis, and the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) in Argentina.

The study, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, is the first genomic characterization of H5N1 in marine wildlife on the Atlantic shore of South America.

A study focused on the animal-human interface of primate trafficking in Peru has just been published in PLOS ONE. Authored by a team of scientists who had contributed to our legacy project PREDICT, this publication highlights the risks of parasite spread and disease emergence in wildlife trafficking scenarios.