‘Tackling Infectious Disease Threats – Preventing, Detecting and Responding with a One Health Approach’ is the topic of the Uppsala Health Summit 2017. It took place on 10 – 11 October and was made up of four plenary sessions and seven workshop sessions.

As a Pan-African leader of One Health, the research consortium Afrique One-ASPIRE attended the summit to share some practical solutions for better health outcomes. Prof. Bassirou Bonfoh, Director of Afrique One-ASPIRE, delivered a keynote speech ‘Making One Health Work’ and contributed to the workshop ‘Whose priorities count? Empowering scientific capacities for locally-relevant and sustainable solutions’.

According to him, One Health can be a solution to health problems, but ‘our generation will not be able to implement the One Health agenda, we need to train the next one well’. For him, there is a need to build and strengthen the capacities in One Health of the new generation of scientists. This ‘Capacity building in One Health requires political will to involve many sectors and scientific disciplines’ without forgetting about the real local issues.

Additionally, he criticized the imbalance of diseases prioritization and invites funders, policy makers and scientists, to ‘prioritize locally important pathogens, such as rabies, (…) not only emerging diseases, but also endemic diseases must be on the agenda’.

Watch the video below