One Health Concept: Building educational and translation research capacity of graduate and post-graduate students in India

Food safety is a global issue with diverse challenges along various critical points in the food production chain. In India, food safety programs including establishment of surveillance programs and quantitative approaches through integration of various scientific disciplines, streamlined data collection, and analyses were still limited and inconsistently applied. There was need to build capacity of public health workforce in the areas of food surveillance, food borne disease surveillance, incident reporting, investigation of an outbreak and inspection. There were no systems in place to ensure this and hence it became critical to train, assess and certify a set of workforce dedicated for this function. A focus was needed to improve communication between public health, animal health, plant health and environmental health disciplines to tackle the problem of food safety. Education and translational research towards sustainable concepts of “Food security” was needed and we chose “One Health” approach to impact food Safety.