I guess for me the most important thing for both of those topics, the One Health initiative and food safety in particular, is that they represent broad collaborations of topic areas. So for food safety, these include understanding how the numbers of pathogens may be increasing in cattle, how to decrease the exposure in the processing plants, and how to educate the public to avoid potential food safety issues. When I go to restaurants, I still get asked how I would like my hamburger cooked, which should never be a question.
And likewise with the One Health initiative, how do we connect? Over the past year we have been trying to connect the medical school deans in Canada with the veterinary school deans. There are issues there of inter-professional education and testing methods—for example, looking at rabies and its pathogenesis in dog bites, and the knowledge-base of physicians and their understanding of how to treat medical patients in that regard, and managing tuberculosis in areas in the north where country foods are important.
So those are all topics that are currently being looked at, and there are more, but the important thing in those areas is to be able to bring broad collaborative groups together.