Authors
J Cable1; 1 Cardiff University, UK Discussion
With >60% of current and emerging human infections being of zoonotic origin and zoonotic pandemics costing the global economy over $60 billion yearly, predicting, detecting and controlling zoonoses represents one of the greatest challenges faced by humanity. These challenges are heightened by a historical lack of interaction among different disciplines studying these diseases, which slows progress on identifying key drivers of zoonoses and in developing pragmatic mitigation strategies. Even within the broad field of biology there are still silos in thinking and approaches, particularly between microbiological and virological fields that are poorly linked to ecological and environmental research. Fields like anthropology and social science are often only weakly integrated into the field of One Health, despite possessing a wealth of potential information and methodological techniques to investigate how human society drives and responds to the emergence and spread of zoonoses. The COVID-19 pandemic is a stark reminder of how a zoonotic pathogen can effectively bring our world to a standstill and cripple the global economy. Prevention is clearly more cost effective than control but remains an elusive goal. One Health/Planetary Health approaches are needed to determine the drivers of zoonotic emergence and spread, and achieve integrated solutions, grounded in sustainable environmental practice, that create environmental barriers to zoonotic transmission. Here we present our new OneZoo Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) which aims to equip the next generation of world leading transdisciplinary scientists with a multidisciplinary toolbox bespoke to their project and a global citizenship outlook. Our programme fosters innovative and critical thinking in a transdisciplinary framework, to create scientists that can improve the health and wellbeing of humans and animals in an environmentally sustainable manner that is equitable and cognisant of socioeconomic, political and cultural needs and constraints. 
