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On March 8, 2010 an e-mail message to Dean Joan Hendricks, prominent One Health supporter/advocate at the University of Pennsylvania school of veterinary medicine in Philadelpia, Pennsylvania (USA) from John Trumper, MD, a longstanding valued One Health supporter in the state of Vermont modestly advised Dr. Hendricks of his remarkable One Health activities this past year.

Dr. Trumper told Dr. Hendricks:
“It's been a year since you helped us launch our One Health Initiative up here, and I promised then to give you some follow up.

We have been concentrating on communicating at the practitioner level of physicians and [veterinarians]. At the state society level, there was a brief One Health Initiative (OHI) presentation at the State Medical Society meeting last fall. I attended the State Veterinary Society meeting, and we now include a veterinarian presenter at the Academy of Pediatrics spring meeting and [veterinarians] are invited to all our membership meetings.

To help at the local community level, we formed a joint committee that meets every 2 months or so and has developed a power point presentation on OHI that [veterinarians] can use at local hospital presentations to physicians. There have been just two talks by [veterinarians] at local hospitals so far, with two more scheduled in April. Subjects have included: "Animal Bites from the Perpetrators Point of View", "People, Pets, & Parasites," and The Raw Milk Sale Debate. We have a request for a speaker on The Ididerad, and on pet obesity and childhood obesity; a connection?

The local veterinarians are invited to all these local hospital presentations and so far attendance by both groups has been gratifying. So, we have a long way to go, but our modest plans of starting at the local level, thanks to your help, are underway.”

Note: The One Health team of Laura H. Kahn, MD, MPH, MPP, Bruce Kaplan, DVM, Thomas P. Monath, MD and Jack Woodall, PhD strongly endorses Dr. Trumper’s model activities and hope that other visionary physicians nationally and internationally will consider following suit.

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Antimicrobial use and antimicrobial resistance are hot issues in the news right now, and there's a lot of confusion and misinformation in the media and on the Internet. With these FAQs, we hope to clear up some of the confusion and provide you with science-based information to help you make educated decisions.

Healthy animals make healthy food, and veterinarians are on the frontlines when it comes to keeping our nation's food supply safe. Advances in animal health care and management have greatly improved food safety over the years and have reduced the need for antimicrobials in food production systems. Nevertheless, antimicrobials are an important part of the veterinarian's toolkit, and veterinarians agree that they should be used judiciously and in the best interest of animal health and public health.

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After 20 years of research, scientists believe they have finally uncovered the normal function of prion proteins, which can cause deadly illnesses such as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) if they become incorrectly folded. An international team of neuroscientists reports that, in mammals, the mysterious proteins help to maintain the myelin sheath that protects the body's nerves. "This opens a new door to studying some of the many common neuropathy disorders — which lead to weakness or loss of sensitivity of limbs — where we don't know the cause," says prion expert Simon Mead at University College London's Institute of Neurology.

The authors suspect that their finding also applies to brain neurons. If so, this would have implications for treating deadly CJD and other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. It could also offer a new way of looking at multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease caused by demyelination of nerves in the brain and spinal cord. The work is published online in Nature Neuroscience.

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Most skin cancers are highly curable, but require surgery that can be painful and scarring. A new study by Loyola University Health System researchers could lead to alternative treatments that would shrink skin cancer tumors with drugs. The drugs would work by turning on a gene that prevents skin cells from becoming cancerous, said senior author Mitchell Denning, Ph.D. The study was published Jan. 15, 2010 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. More than 1 million people in the United States are diagnosed with skin cancer each year. In the new study, researchers examined a type of skin cancer, called squamous cell carcinoma, that accounts for between 200,000 and 300,000 new cases per year. Squamous cell carcinoma begins in the upper part of the epidermis, the top layer of the skin.

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