Two Department of Global Health faculty -- Ali Mokdad, PhD, and Peter Rabinowitz, MD, PhD -- were among 80 researchers around the world to receive Gates Grand Challenges grants Nov. 20 to "pursue bold ideas in global health and development:"

The "One Health" Concept: Bringing Together Human and Animal Health for New Solutions
Ali Mokdad and a team at the University of Washington in the U.S. will integrate data on animal health and its determinants to better understand and monitor human health and opportunity in the developing world. Animal health, which itself is influenced by environmental factors, has a direct impact on human health. Although data on all these areas exist, there has been no attempt to amalgamate them to measure the overall impact on human health. They will assess data from Zambia on environmental factors such as temperature and rainfall, and the condition and sales of animals and crops, to identify indicators of animal health. These will be integrated with data on human disease burden and mortality to generate an enhanced human health metric that incorporates the effects of animal health. They will also make recommendations for improved data collection.
Peter Rabinowitz of the University of Washington in the U.S., along with colleagues at Washington State University and CDC Kenya, will test whether unhealthy gut microbes in livestock that co-reside with humans in smallholder households can negatively influence the gut microbes in the humans, and whether this can be exploited to improve human health. The microbial community (microbiota) living in the gut is important for childhood health, growth and development. They will analyze the gut microbiotas of healthy and unhealthy children and co-residing companion and domestic animals in selected households in western Kenya to determine whether they are related. If they are, they will reset the animal microbiota using established fecal transplant methods and determine whether there is a corresponding positive effect on the microbiotas of the rest of the household.