On 23 September, OneSTOP organised a webinar focused on the plant-blindness of the OneHealth approach. The recording is available on YouTube. 

During the event, Louise Hendrickx from Meise Botanic Garden explained how people tend to overlook plants and what that means for OneHealth.

OneHealth links human, animal and environmental health, but its roots in zoonotic disease mean that "environment" is often reduced to climate and pollution. As a result, plants are rarely treated as health actors in their own right. In that context, Louise showed how plants shape the food we eat, the soil and microbiomes we depend on, the air we breathe, the healthcare we receive and the diseases we encounter. 

Moreover, Louise argued that the data on plants already exist but rarely reach health decision-makers. She presented OneSTOP’s policy brief on the topic, which recommends policy makers to add plant indicators to health monitoring and give botanists and ecologists a place on OneHealth advisory bodies.

The webinar ended with a panel discussion between Nicolas Antoine-Moussiaux (University of Liege), Patrick Deckers (Caring Doctors), Emilia Hannula (Leiden University) and Helen Roy (UKCEH), all working on the topic from different perspectives. The panelists agreed that the biggest barrier is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of shared language between disciplines and proposed ways to overcome this barrier. 

Watch the recording to learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spwx9OI08ss