942 - Could One Health Prevent the Next Pandemic?

Public Health On Call

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

News, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.6 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

About this episode:

Animal-to-human transmission of bacteria and viruses have triggered outbreaks of diseases like avian influenza, COVID-19, and Ebola. A public health approach called One Health can help us to better understand these cases—and possibly help prevent future pandemics. In this episode: Professors Emily Gurley and Raina Plowright explain how One Health investigations work, why they're an effective tool for addressing spillover events, and a new One Health Coursera course that you can preview for free: https://www.coursera.org/learn/one-health-investigations-of-outbreaks-and-spillover-events

Guest:

Emily S. Gurley, PhD, MPH, is a professor in Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she focuses on infectious disease and outbreak investigation.

Raina K. Plowright, PhD, MS, is a veterinarian and the Rudolf J. and Katharine L. Steffen Professor of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University.

Host:

Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Show links and related content:

A Roadmap of Primary Pandemic Prevention Through Spillover Investigation—Emerging Infectious Diseases
Healthy Ecosystems, Healthy Humans—Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine
What's the Difference? The Meaning of One Health—Global Health Now
Can Spillover—How Viruses Move From Animals to Humans—Be Prevented?—Public Health On Call (November 2021)

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0:00.0	Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,
0:05.9	where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.
0:16.3	If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.
0:21.6	Jh.edu.
0:22.6	That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.
0:29.6	It's Lindsay Smith Rogers.
0:31.6	Today, how investigating spillover events with a one-health approach is a vital part of pandemic prevention. I'm joined by two experts in spillover events with a one health approach is a vital part of pandemic prevention.
0:39.3	I'm joined by two experts in spillover event investigation, Dr. Raina Plowright, a veterinarian and
0:45.3	disease ecologist at Cornell, and Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist and distinguished professor of the
0:50.9	practice at Johns Hopkins, who talk about what goes into these complex
0:54.9	investigations and a new Coursera course for anyone interested in learning more. Let's listen.
1:01.6	Emily Gurley and Raina Plowright, welcome to public health on call. We're so glad to have you.
1:06.9	Today we are talking about pandemic prevention, specifically spillover events.
1:11.8	Would you start off by giving us a refresher on what spillover events are and maybe some examples?
1:17.0	Let's start with you, Raina.
1:19.3	Sure.
1:20.2	So spillover is the transmission of a pathogen, a pathogen being like a virus or bacteria between species.
1:29.3	And we call it zoonotic spillover if the pathogens going from a non-human animal to a human.
1:37.1	We call it a zoonotic pathogen.
1:39.5	That's the pathogen that actually does the spreading from animal to human.
1:44.0	And the disease that results
1:45.9	from that is called a zoonotic disease. And almost every pandemic in the last hundred years
	...

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