November 26, 2024 • 18 mins
In this episode of "Going Macro on Micro," our experts, Dr. Elaine Cloutman-Green and Dr. Simon Doherty, join host Dr. Julie Ann Lough to discuss the challenges of getting diverse stakeholders with competing interests on board. The conversation centers on the apparent conflicts between environmental sustainability measures and infection control requirements, such as the use of single-use plastics versus reusable materials. Both experts stress the need for a balanced and nuanced approach, where the long-term benefits of sustainability are weighed against the immediate infection control needs, and solutions are developed that address both concerns.
2024-13527
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Going Macro on Micro, the podcast where we explore emerging themes in microbiology, brought to you by Beckman Coulter.
(00:15):
I am your host, Dr. Julie Ann Lough, a science communicator passionate about sharing stories, exploring the future of health and science.
This is the fourth episode in our series, exploring One Health, an integrated approach that recognises that the health of people, animals, and ecosystems are all interconnected.
(00:36):
When we think about the challenges facing our health from pandemics to antibiotic resistance, it's clear that no one exists in a vacuum.
We are all in this together.
In the last episode, we spoke about the benefits of multidisciplinary teams, including social scientists, in working together to achieve the goals of One Health.
(00:56):
And in this episode, we're going to discuss how to bring stakeholders on that journey with us, particularly in the face of competing financial or environmental interests.
We continue to chat to our great experts in human and animal health.
On the human side, Dr. Elaine Cloutman-Green, who is a consultant clinical scientist specialising in infection prevention and control, as well as the lead healthcare scientist at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
(01:23):
And on the animal side, we have Dr. Simon Doherty, an associate fellow at Queen's University Belfast, and recently named the World Veterinary Association's World Vet of the Year.
Both are passionate about achieving the goals of One Health.
Elaine, we mentioned in the previous episode that there can be institutional and cultural barriers to implementing change.
(01:44):
So how do you engage stakeholders, including, I suppose, on an individual level?
So I think stories are really powerful.
I can give people a lot of facts.
Facts tend to either lead to boredom or fear.
And I think actually sometimes being able to use stories and narrative can really get people to move positions because you have to almost engage, you know, we're human beings, right?
(02:10):
We have emotions, we have values, and you almost need to make sure you're engaging with those in order to get people to truly engage and have the best quality of conversation.
And I think as scientists, we often have a tendency to revert to facts when we're stressed or numbers when we feel like we're going into a less than comfortable environment, thinking that that makes us come over as better and that people will kind of then take us more seriously.
(02:39):
Whereas actually, I think it's quite an alienating way to approach things.
And so I think if you can get people to talk honestly, and as Simon was saying, talk about stories of kind of why their scenario matters, then I think people can really engage with that and have a lot more open conversations.
(03:02):
And Simon, as Elaine says, you mentioned working with social scientists to instigate behavioural change.
So how can we empower individuals, you know, be that farmers, vets, or owners to think about infection control and contribute to the One Health efforts?
It does very much come back to that sort of case study approach, the storytelling.
(03:26):
And one of the things that we talk about now in science communication more generally is that ability to tell stories.
It's being able to get a story across that people can relate to.
And one of the things that we find, for example, with farmers is that the best people to teach farmers are other farmers.
(03:46):
And that's why we have farm walks, we get them out, we get them all chatting with each other.
Yeah, look, there's an element of care needs to be taken with that.
If a farmer is getting his best information from his neighbour, then it's not necessarily always the most robust information.
But there is an element then of bringing people along where you're looking for behaviour change, you know, and we're rather than sort of talking about "oh, well, you know, this, this antibiotic tube, you know, for these cows, that's a good strong one
(04:20):
that's, you know, it's, you know, I would, you definitely need to get, you need to get a hold of this one."
It's more holistic about actually "you know, you see these, you know, this teat sealant, this is far, far better
and the vet was talking to me about the, you know, how much less antibiotic I can use, you know, using this, using this teat sealant rather than using the tubes
(04:43):
And sure, that's great, because also the farm quality assurance guys there want me to use less antibiotics in the supermarket or want me to use less antibiotics."
So this is a great job, you know, it's that type of communication that you're going to get maybe between farmers, which can be, which can be really constructive.
Internet can be an absolute nightmare, you know, in terms of misinformation getting kind of going through.
(05:04):
And so I think that's why we as a scientific community need to get a bit better at engaging.
I mean, I've seen some really good science communication.
Health for Animals is an industry body and Animal Health Europe is another industry body that are fantastic at maybe producing infographics about the importance of vaccination or the importance of reducing antibiotic usage.
(05:31):
And that information can be useful whenever it's presented in that kind of way.
So yeah, science communication to me is really, really critical.
And that ability to storytell and provide case studies can be useful.
People don't want to invest maybe in a change of process if they can't see the results just now.
So how do you get people to think about the long term benefits of adopting either, you know, environmentally sustainable practises, thinking about infection control going forward, the One Health approaches?
(06:03):
How do you really engage those stakeholders, especially maybe if they're thinking about other things like, oh, well, I've got to also think about my environmental concerns, I've got to think about my financial concerns as well.
How do you approach that, Elaine?
It's a really interesting one.
All of the stuff that you see on human AMR will say more people will die of AMR than cancer by 2050.
It's a cold bucket of water on any form of change, because A, no one wants to think about 2050 and B, no one wants to think about death.
(06:32):
Like neither of those things actually really engage people in long term change.
I think people engage with journeys and people engage with pathways.
And so you have to not ask them to look about what will something will look like in 20 years.
That's meaningless for everybody.
Right.
Nobody can envision.
I had no idea I'd be here with you 20 years ago.
(06:54):
To be honest, I thought I'd be winning an Oscar or something.
I had no idea that this was how my life was going to turn out.
And I think therefore it's too much to expect anybody to envisage what that's like.
But I do think that you can talk about what might happen to someone's grandmother, right?
Or what might happen to someone's kids and use those tools as a way of getting people to think ahead in order to change things up.
(07:23):
I think in some ways there's a lot of work that has been done on climate change conversations that we can easily learn from in terms of AMR, but also that shows how challenging that is.
I think if you try to do it in an evidence based way, although that's how we practise in health and obviously in other forms of science, I think you're kind of onto a bit of a loser.
(07:48):
I just don't think that people are going to truly engage with it if that's how you're going to go.
And so you always have to show people, we use theatre a lot to be honest.
And so I work with a
playwright who will kind of show you different glimpses of the future in work that she does,
or will bring kids into an imaginary environment where they can almost work through how they would
(08:14):
feel in different environments without that fear and judgement that almost happens when you're saying
to somebody, why have you gone to the doctors to get antibiotic for that viral infection?
That is judgemental.
If you take somebody in and we have like a sock puppet called Sock the Puppet, who's terrified of germs, he will then talk about why he's scared of germs and what that means.
(08:38):
And you're removing that judgement because it's not about them as individuals.
And I think we have to be inventive and we have to remove all of that judgement that we tend to put on people and processes.
It's about informing people.
You mentioned climate change there.
And Simon, I suppose it brings us on to this important point about considering the ecological footprint of these things.
(09:03):
How can One Health and infection control be done in a way that I suppose promotes environmental sustainability and reduces the either veterinary sectors or healthcare sectors ecological footprint?
Yeah.
And again, I mean, some of this again comes down to taking the experience of others and being able to sort of portray it in the right kind of way to make it look certainly an awful lot more attractive.
(09:28):
So, I mean, there are areas that we're looking at now in terms of regenerative farming techniques, for example, that will help to improve biodiversity, help to improve soil structure, but also by maybe cropping with chicory can actually help to reduce the amounts of anthelmintics that we need to give to our livestock because there's a natural anthelmintic effect.
(09:52):
Now, I mean, clearly you're not going to control all of the worms and fluke in a herd of dairy cattle by just putting them on a pasture, which has got a bit of chicory on it.
But the point is that the chicory will have an effect that will help you to reduce the amount of maybe ivermectin that you're using in your cattle.
If you can reduce the amount of ivermectin that you're using in the cattle, you'll kill less dung beetles because the dung that's coming out the other end of the cattle, you know, the dung beetles will still be there because there's not as much ivermectin to kill the dung beetles.
(10:24):
Therefore, you improve the utilisation of the dung into the pasture, it's taken into the pasture, it has a better soil fertility effect.
These are the kind of stories now that we are developing.
Again, I'm not sort of saying story in terms of fiction, but there's work going on on this at the minute, which is helping farmers to understand that regenerative farming is not just about wildflower meadows.
(10:54):
You know, it's still about health and welfare and productivity, but it's using some of the knowledge that we have now that will help us to reduce the amount of antibiotics or the amount of anthelmintics that we're using in our cattle.
Likewise, same goes across sheep, the same goes across, you know, other production systems as well.
(11:15):
There's a huge amount of work done in the aquaculture sector, for example, about using cleaner fish.
Rather than using antibiotics or using powerful drugs that are going to kill sea lice, we're actually putting in lumpfish or Ballan wrasse, which are biological controls.
(11:36):
These animals feed off sea lice and they keep the gills of the trout and salmon really nice and clean.
And using sort of biological control mechanisms can be part of that.
Clearly, we then have a role to play in maintaining the health and the welfare of those cleaner fish, as well as the actual fish that we're using for food production.
(11:56):
These are narratives now that are really developing and it's powerful to see that.
Elaine, I suppose that brings me to a human side of things.
You think about there's this push now to conserve water or to have well-sealed windows so you're not having to pay huge amounts of money for heating, those sorts of things.
(12:17):
But then what can be the conflict, I suppose, between some of these environmentally friendly measures and infection control interventions?
Like, how do you make sure that they don't undermine each other?
I have a lot of conversations with people about sustainability and the Green Agenda.
And, I mean, I work in a hospital where we have said that every building we build, we want to be as carbon neutral as possible because we're paediatrics and children are our future and we want to leave them with a world to enjoy and grow up in.
(12:47):
It's a really important thing.
It's sometimes fascinating that people don't want to deal with the bigger challenges.
So we have a thing, we use something called silver copper low temperature for our water system, which means you don't heat the water up to 63 and then drop it down for use.
In order to deal with your Legionella, we dose our water at source and then it gets kept at 42 degrees.
(13:11):
That saves us about 3.8 houses of annual electricity per building per year.
You know, that's a big change that we do and then we maintain it, but you're not doing a load, loads of small changes.
I sometimes feel there's a lack of appetite to tackle the, let's make a big change that has ongoing benefits.
(13:35):
Whereas actually, let's use less wipes.
Actually, I need to clean my surfaces.
I have adenovirus that survives for three months.
I've got Staph Aureus that can survive for a year, right?
I need to clean my surfaces.
There's a lot of conversations about the fact that we need to use less cleaning agents and things.
I think those aren't necessarily the right conversation.
(13:59):
It's like, how do we do that, but in a way that's still safe?
Actually, if you don't like a wipe, actually could I use bamboo as the component of the wipe, but I still need to clean and I still need to use a wipe.
So sometimes it's really about slightly pushing back about the fact that people want the easy fix versus let's have the conversation about how to make this work long-term, not just for six weeks, because it looks really good as part of a transformation project or an improvement project.
(14:31):
Let's do the big things and be brave and tackle the big challenges rather than try to shortcut everything.
So I think that's the kind of conversations that we're having a lot in infection control right now.
We have similar conversations in veterinary medicine.
There are parts of the United States, for example, which have moved towards dairy systems, which are zero antibiotics.
(14:56):
The danger there is if you go that extreme, you will have an effect on animal welfare.
But actually, whenever you dig into these systems, really kind of all that they do is they take that animal out of that zero antibiotic system and they put it into a conventional system and treat it with antibiotics.
(15:16):
So they then have this kind of dual sort of system where they're creating milk with zero antibiotics.
The time the milk is in the container, it should have zero antibiotics in it anyway.
If you've treated an animal, you will have allowed the withdrawal period and it will have zero antibiotics in anyway.
So there's a lot of how you play with marketing and some of these things, whereas the narrative here is as little as possible, but as much as is necessary in terms of antibiotic usage and whether that also applies to drapes and wipes and things like that.
(15:51):
There was a bit of a movement a few years ago that, well, we want to get rid of all these single use drapes from surgery and, you know, to be more sustainable.
And we'll go back to the old cloth drapes, you know, that we would have had before.
It's about balance.
If you're doing something like a lump removal or something like that there, you can use a cloth drape and wash it again and it's relatively low risk.
(16:19):
But if you're doing spinal surgery or something fairly invasive in the chest, you'll use a single use drape.
So it's not to say that we shouldn't have a general direction of travel towards being more sustainable.
Clearly there are things that we can do, whether it's use of anaesthetic gases, use of antibiotics, use of disinfectants, use of gowns and drapes and single use plastics and all that kind of stuff.
(16:42):
We can move in the right direction by all means, but we have to be sensible with it at the same time.
The point is, though, that quite often when we're taking on some of these sustainable practises, we do actually save money.
And, I think that's one that's worth remembering as well.
People have this idea that if you become more sustainable that, oh, that's much more expensive.
(17:05):
Quite often it's not actually, but it's just about getting the right kind of practise for the environment.
Again, we're back to people, animals, shared environment.
It's about understanding that environment, which will help us to make those decisions.
We're going to finish this episode on that note.
I think with a reminder that telling stories is the best way to get stakeholders on board.
(17:27):
Explaining the long-term benefits in an inclusive manner so that everyone knows the benefits of One Health, not just in the short term, but the long term too.
And I guess also just to highlight that financial and environmental goals are not mutually exclusive to the goals of One Health.
Simon and Elaine, thank you so much for joining me in this episode.
(17:48):
In the next episode, we're going to expand our horizons and look to the challenges of the future and expand our learning even further.
Going Macro on Micro is a podcast series supported by Beckman Coulter, exploring emerging themes in microbiology.
Subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to stay up to date with each new episode as it's released.
(18:09):
You can also join our online professional community by searching Beckman Coulter Microbiology on LinkedIn.
There you'll find discussions on a variety of interesting microbiology topics.
Until next time, when we go macro on micro, goodbye.
Hello, and welcome to Going Macro on Micro, the podcast where we explore emerging themes in microbiology, brought to you by Beckman Coulter.
(00:15):
I am your host, Dr. Julie Ann Lough, a science communicator passionate about sharing stories, exploring the future of health and science.
This is the fourth episode in our series, exploring One Health, an integrated approach that recognises that the health of people, animals, and ecosystems are all interconnected.
(00:36):
When we think about the challenges facing our health from pandemics to antibiotic resistance, it's clear that no one exists in a vacuum.
We are all in this together.
In the last episode, we spoke about the benefits of multidisciplinary teams, including social scientists, in working together to achieve the goals of One Health.
(00:56):
And in this episode, we're going to discuss how to bring stakeholders on that journey with us, particularly in the face of competing financial or environmental interests.
We continue to chat to our great experts in human and animal health.
On the human side, Dr. Elaine Cloutman-Green, who is a consultant clinical scientist specialising in infection prevention and control, as well as the lead healthcare scientist at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
(01:23):
And on the animal side, we have Dr. Simon Doherty, an associate fellow at Queen's University Belfast, and recently named the World Veterinary Association's World Vet of the Year.
Both are passionate about achieving the goals of One Health.
Elaine, we mentioned in the previous episode that there can be institutional and cultural barriers to implementing change.
(01:44):
So how do you engage stakeholders, including, I suppose, on an individual level?
So I think stories are really powerful.
I can give people a lot of facts.
Facts tend to either lead to boredom or fear.
And I think actually sometimes being able to use stories and narrative can really get people to move positions because you have to almost engage, you know, we're human beings, right?
(02:10):
We have emotions, we have values, and you almost need to make sure you're engaging with those in order to get people to truly engage and have the best quality of conversation.
And I think as scientists, we often have a tendency to revert to facts when we're stressed or numbers when we feel like we're going into a less than comfortable environment, thinking that that makes us come over as better and that people will kind of then take us more seriously.
(02:39):
Whereas actually, I think it's quite an alienating way to approach things.
And so I think if you can get people to talk honestly, and as Simon was saying, talk about stories of kind of why their scenario matters, then I think people can really engage with that and have a lot more open conversations.
(03:02):
And Simon, as Elaine says, you mentioned working with social scientists to instigate behavioural change.
So how can we empower individuals, you know, be that farmers, vets, or owners to think about infection control and contribute to the One Health efforts?
It does very much come back to that sort of case study approach, the storytelling.
(03:26):
And one of the things that we talk about now in science communication more generally is that ability to tell stories.
It's being able to get a story across that people can relate to.
And one of the things that we find, for example, with farmers is that the best people to teach farmers are other farmers.
(03:46):
And that's why we have farm walks, we get them out, we get them all chatting with each other.
Yeah, look, there's an element of care needs to be taken with that.
If a farmer is getting his best information from his neighbour, then it's not necessarily always the most robust information.
But there is an element then of bringing people along where you're looking for behaviour change, you know, and we're rather than sort of talking about "oh, well, you know, this, this antibiotic tube, you know, for these cows, that's a good strong one
(04:20):
that's, you know, it's, you know, I would, you definitely need to get, you need to get a hold of this one."
It's more holistic about actually "you know, you see these, you know, this teat sealant, this is far, far better
and the vet was talking to me about the, you know, how much less antibiotic I can use, you know, using this, using this teat sealant rather than using the tubes
(04:43):
And sure, that's great, because also the farm quality assurance guys there want me to use less antibiotics in the supermarket or want me to use less antibiotics."
So this is a great job, you know, it's that type of communication that you're going to get maybe between farmers, which can be, which can be really constructive.
Internet can be an absolute nightmare, you know, in terms of misinformation getting kind of going through.
(05:04):
And so I think that's why we as a scientific community need to get a bit better at engaging.
I mean, I've seen some really good science communication.
Health for Animals is an industry body and Animal Health Europe is another industry body that are fantastic at maybe producing infographics about the importance of vaccination or the importance of reducing antibiotic usage.
(05:31):
And that information can be useful whenever it's presented in that kind of way.
So yeah, science communication to me is really, really critical.
And that ability to storytell and provide case studies can be useful.
People don't want to invest maybe in a change of process if they can't see the results just now.
So how do you get people to think about the long term benefits of adopting either, you know, environmentally sustainable practises, thinking about infection control going forward, the One Health approaches?
(06:03):
How do you really engage those stakeholders, especially maybe if they're thinking about other things like, oh, well, I've got to also think about my environmental concerns, I've got to think about my financial concerns as well.
How do you approach that, Elaine?
It's a really interesting one.
All of the stuff that you see on human AMR will say more people will die of AMR than cancer by 2050.
It's a cold bucket of water on any form of change, because A, no one wants to think about 2050 and B, no one wants to think about death.
(06:32):
Like neither of those things actually really engage people in long term change.
I think people engage with journeys and people engage with pathways.
And so you have to not ask them to look about what will something will look like in 20 years.
That's meaningless for everybody.
Right.
Nobody can envision.
I had no idea I'd be here with you 20 years ago.
(06:54):
To be honest, I thought I'd be winning an Oscar or something.
I had no idea that this was how my life was going to turn out.
And I think therefore it's too much to expect anybody to envisage what that's like.
But I do think that you can talk about what might happen to someone's grandmother, right?
Or what might happen to someone's kids and use those tools as a way of getting people to think ahead in order to change things up.
(07:23):
I think in some ways there's a lot of work that has been done on climate change conversations that we can easily learn from in terms of AMR, but also that shows how challenging that is.
I think if you try to do it in an evidence based way, although that's how we practise in health and obviously in other forms of science, I think you're kind of onto a bit of a loser.
(07:48):
I just don't think that people are going to truly engage with it if that's how you're going to go.
And so you always have to show people, we use theatre a lot to be honest.
And so I work with a
playwright who will kind of show you different glimpses of the future in work that she does,
or will bring kids into an imaginary environment where they can almost work through how they would
(08:14):
feel in different environments without that fear and judgement that almost happens when you're saying
to somebody, why have you gone to the doctors to get antibiotic for that viral infection?
That is judgemental.
If you take somebody in and we have like a sock puppet called Sock the Puppet, who's terrified of germs, he will then talk about why he's scared of germs and what that means.
(08:38):
And you're removing that judgement because it's not about them as individuals.
And I think we have to be inventive and we have to remove all of that judgement that we tend to put on people and processes.
It's about informing people.
You mentioned climate change there.
And Simon, I suppose it brings us on to this important point about considering the ecological footprint of these things.
(09:03):
How can One Health and infection control be done in a way that I suppose promotes environmental sustainability and reduces the either veterinary sectors or healthcare sectors ecological footprint?
Yeah.
And again, I mean, some of this again comes down to taking the experience of others and being able to sort of portray it in the right kind of way to make it look certainly an awful lot more attractive.
(09:28):
So, I mean, there are areas that we're looking at now in terms of regenerative farming techniques, for example, that will help to improve biodiversity, help to improve soil structure, but also by maybe cropping with chicory can actually help to reduce the amounts of anthelmintics that we need to give to our livestock because there's a natural anthelmintic effect.
(09:52):
Now, I mean, clearly you're not going to control all of the worms and fluke in a herd of dairy cattle by just putting them on a pasture, which has got a bit of chicory on it.
But the point is that the chicory will have an effect that will help you to reduce the amount of maybe ivermectin that you're using in your cattle.
If you can reduce the amount of ivermectin that you're using in the cattle, you'll kill less dung beetles because the dung that's coming out the other end of the cattle, you know, the dung beetles will still be there because there's not as much ivermectin to kill the dung beetles.
(10:24):
Therefore, you improve the utilisation of the dung into the pasture, it's taken into the pasture, it has a better soil fertility effect.
These are the kind of stories now that we are developing.
Again, I'm not sort of saying story in terms of fiction, but there's work going on on this at the minute, which is helping farmers to understand that regenerative farming is not just about wildflower meadows.
(10:54):
You know, it's still about health and welfare and productivity, but it's using some of the knowledge that we have now that will help us to reduce the amount of antibiotics or the amount of anthelmintics that we're using in our cattle.
Likewise, same goes across sheep, the same goes across, you know, other production systems as well.
(11:15):
There's a huge amount of work done in the aquaculture sector, for example, about using cleaner fish.
Rather than using antibiotics or using powerful drugs that are going to kill sea lice, we're actually putting in lumpfish or Ballan wrasse, which are biological controls.
(11:36):
These animals feed off sea lice and they keep the gills of the trout and salmon really nice and clean.
And using sort of biological control mechanisms can be part of that.
Clearly, we then have a role to play in maintaining the health and the welfare of those cleaner fish, as well as the actual fish that we're using for food production.
(11:56):
These are narratives now that are really developing and it's powerful to see that.
Elaine, I suppose that brings me to a human side of things.
You think about there's this push now to conserve water or to have well-sealed windows so you're not having to pay huge amounts of money for heating, those sorts of things.
(12:17):
But then what can be the conflict, I suppose, between some of these environmentally friendly measures and infection control interventions?
Like, how do you make sure that they don't undermine each other?
I have a lot of conversations with people about sustainability and the Green Agenda.
And, I mean, I work in a hospital where we have said that every building we build, we want to be as carbon neutral as possible because we're paediatrics and children are our future and we want to leave them with a world to enjoy and grow up in.
(12:47):
It's a really important thing.
It's sometimes fascinating that people don't want to deal with the bigger challenges.
So we have a thing, we use something called silver copper low temperature for our water system, which means you don't heat the water up to 63 and then drop it down for use.
In order to deal with your Legionella, we dose our water at source and then it gets kept at 42 degrees.
(13:11):
That saves us about 3.8 houses of annual electricity per building per year.
You know, that's a big change that we do and then we maintain it, but you're not doing a load, loads of small changes.
I sometimes feel there's a lack of appetite to tackle the, let's make a big change that has ongoing benefits.
(13:35):
Whereas actually, let's use less wipes.
Actually, I need to clean my surfaces.
I have adenovirus that survives for three months.
I've got Staph Aureus that can survive for a year, right?
I need to clean my surfaces.
There's a lot of conversations about the fact that we need to use less cleaning agents and things.
I think those aren't necessarily the right conversation.
(13:59):
It's like, how do we do that, but in a way that's still safe?
Actually, if you don't like a wipe, actually could I use bamboo as the component of the wipe, but I still need to clean and I still need to use a wipe.
So sometimes it's really about slightly pushing back about the fact that people want the easy fix versus let's have the conversation about how to make this work long-term, not just for six weeks, because it looks really good as part of a transformation project or an improvement project.
(14:31):
Let's do the big things and be brave and tackle the big challenges rather than try to shortcut everything.
So I think that's the kind of conversations that we're having a lot in infection control right now.
We have similar conversations in veterinary medicine.
There are parts of the United States, for example, which have moved towards dairy systems, which are zero antibiotics.
(14:56):
The danger there is if you go that extreme, you will have an effect on animal welfare.
But actually, whenever you dig into these systems, really kind of all that they do is they take that animal out of that zero antibiotic system and they put it into a conventional system and treat it with antibiotics.
(15:16):
So they then have this kind of dual sort of system where they're creating milk with zero antibiotics.
The time the milk is in the container, it should have zero antibiotics in it anyway.
If you've treated an animal, you will have allowed the withdrawal period and it will have zero antibiotics in anyway.
So there's a lot of how you play with marketing and some of these things, whereas the narrative here is as little as possible, but as much as is necessary in terms of antibiotic usage and whether that also applies to drapes and wipes and things like that.
(15:51):
There was a bit of a movement a few years ago that, well, we want to get rid of all these single use drapes from surgery and, you know, to be more sustainable.
And we'll go back to the old cloth drapes, you know, that we would have had before.
It's about balance.
If you're doing something like a lump removal or something like that there, you can use a cloth drape and wash it again and it's relatively low risk.
(16:19):
But if you're doing spinal surgery or something fairly invasive in the chest, you'll use a single use drape.
So it's not to say that we shouldn't have a general direction of travel towards being more sustainable.
Clearly there are things that we can do, whether it's use of anaesthetic gases, use of antibiotics, use of disinfectants, use of gowns and drapes and single use plastics and all that kind of stuff.
(16:42):
We can move in the right direction by all means, but we have to be sensible with it at the same time.
The point is, though, that quite often when we're taking on some of these sustainable practises, we do actually save money.
And, I think that's one that's worth remembering as well.
People have this idea that if you become more sustainable that, oh, that's much more expensive.
(17:05):
Quite often it's not actually, but it's just about getting the right kind of practise for the environment.
Again, we're back to people, animals, shared environment.
It's about understanding that environment, which will help us to make those decisions.
We're going to finish this episode on that note.
I think with a reminder that telling stories is the best way to get stakeholders on board.
(17:27):
Explaining the long-term benefits in an inclusive manner so that everyone knows the benefits of One Health, not just in the short term, but the long term too.
And I guess also just to highlight that financial and environmental goals are not mutually exclusive to the goals of One Health.
Simon and Elaine, thank you so much for joining me in this episode.
(17:48):
In the next episode, we're going to expand our horizons and look to the challenges of the future and expand our learning even further.
Going Macro on Micro is a podcast series supported by Beckman Coulter, exploring emerging themes in microbiology.
Subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to stay up to date with each new episode as it's released.
(18:09):
You can also join our online professional community by searching Beckman Coulter Microbiology on LinkedIn.
There you'll find discussions on a variety of interesting microbiology topics.
Until next time, when we go macro on micro, goodbye.
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