Cook Islands representatives Ngatamaine Rongo from the Ministry of Health, Kuraiti Rasmussen, and Piriariki Maao from the Ministry of Agriculture and Lydia Sijp from the NES, attended a five day ONE Health Inception Meeting and Workshop held earlier this month in Nadi, Fiji.
The ONE Health Inception meeting was in short, a collaboration and networking of Blue Pacific Countries to prioritise actions to improve cross agency responses to common health, agriculture and security Problems, including Security Threats. The One Health meeting for the Pacific was a major milestone in enhancing health by integrating human, animal, and environmental care.
The event, organized by the Quadripartite agencies (FAO, WHO, WOAH, UNEP) with support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) SPC and the Pacific Security College, aimed to improve cooperation among different sectors such as Environment, Agriculture, and Public Health. Key components of the meeting included a Health Security session focusing on the role of security agencies in managing biological and environmental threats, a workshop to develop a unified One Health plan across sectors, and a session on climate change impacts on health.
The meeting emphasized the urgent need for a One Health approach to address issues like chronic diseases, zoonotic diseases, food security, and climate change impacts, highlighting the importance of cross-sector collaboration and international partnerships.
For the Cook Islands, this means improving our collaboration and networking with Key partner agencies, to strengthen multi-sectorial capacity building initiatives’, including strengthening surveillance systems to monitor and respond to threats across human, animal, and environmental health sectors. The Cook Islands team are appreciative of all the regional agencies who sponsored their attendance to this milestone meeting.
