One Health Seminar Series: Using a One Health approach to understanding and mitigating risks to swimmers

Dr. David McCarthy, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Waterborne Pathogens: Surveillance, Prediction, and Mitigation, leads a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences (CEPS), the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) and the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC).  The team aims to understand how pathogens from human and animal waste move through urban water cycles, how they interact with humans and how to reduce the health risks they pose. 

To do this, McCarthy’s lab is developing novel technologies to detect pathogens and their sources in near real-time, designing a “lab-on-a-chip” device to enable pathogen detection in the field, and modelling how humans interact with sources of contamination and reduce pathogen loads in the environment. McCarthy’s team emphasizes solutions that are easy to use, low cost, open source and open hardware, to encourage and enable their use in all parts of the globe.