PR’s Top Pros Talk: Tish Van Dyke

Tish Van Dyke, Executive Vice President at JPA Health, describes how the One Health concept can be applied to an organization’s core business. Tish describes key findings from JPA’s latest report, “One World, One Health: Exploring the Connectability between Human, Animal and Environmental Health”. Tish also shares her excitement for the future of the industry.

Click here to download the report.

>> Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and others.

TRANSCRIPT:

DOUG: I often joke that if people could love people as much as they love their dogs and cats, it would be a much better world. But Tish, it turns out that it’s actually sort of important from a health perspective, that people focus on animals as much as they do people. Can you explain that concept?

TISH: Yeah, it’s really important, Doug, for people to focus not just on animals, but also our environment as much as they do people. Right. So, I work specifically in One Health, which is that intersection of human health, animal health and the health of the planet. And what has happened, and we all see this happening on a day-to-day basis. Right? What’s happening is we see our climate change; we see increasing impacts on that of human health and animal health. So, it’s something really important for us to love all of those three areas as much as we love one.

DOUG: So does this method present challenges for brands but also opportunities?

TISH: It absolutely does. So, let’s talk about the opportunities. I think there’s some real opportunities, when you think about the one health concept, which is, as I mentioned, that interconnectivity between animal, human and environmental health. There’s an opportunity there for collaborative, cross-sector, cross-disciplinary approaches working at local, regional, you know, national and global levels, to address those kinds of things that impact health. Health of people, health of animals, and health of the environment so that we truly attain optimal health for all three of those areas.

DOUG: Now, I could see the importance for an NGO to say that they’re pushing this concept. How do you see it aligning with like a brand investing not only in the concept, but investing in communicating about the concept? And what role does that communications piece play in the overall strategy?

TISH: Yeah, well, certainly brand specifically working in so many of these spaces, right. If you’re a food and beverage brand, you want to be working, you know, and you want your foods and your beverages to certainly be more sustainable. You want to help fix the global health system and make that more sustainable and more resilient. If you are a brand working in the pharmaceutical space, whether it’s in human health or animal health, you want to be talking about how you are optimizing the resources that you are using in this space to make a more resilient health system that’s, you know ensuring the optimal health of the humans and the animals.

DOUG: You know, that makes a lot of sense. Are you finding for organizations this would be under their, say, ESG initiatives, or does it really become more about their core businesses for many organizations?

TISH: You know, it can be ESG, but I think this is what One Health does, is it allows companies to move beyond that ESG space and really make it part of their core business and bring it into their operations and make it part of the companies and the brands and the products that they’re producing, and then take it out then to their consumers, whether it’s a B2C consumer or a B2B consumer.

DOUG: Can you tell us about the report that you’ve just released on this One Health concept?

TISH: I’m really excited about it, actually. What we found in this study, was that three big things, right? Number one, the one health community is a really small, limited community. It sits within its own bubble. The second thing we found was that climate, and this surprised us, climate and conservation stakeholders are not engaged in the One Health discussion. They’re engaged in discussions around environmental health, but they’re not engaged at that intersection of the human, animal, and environmental health discussion. So that’s a big opportunity there. And then finally we looked at the policymaker communities. So, we looked at global and EU policymakers. They’re pretty disconnected from the One Health conversation. And clearly, they have a role to play in all of this but, even more, sort of depressing in all of this is that US policy makers are even more disconnected from this discussion. And so, the role that

policymakers have is so big in this space, right, to help to improve and get us ready for future health challenges and yet they’re not involved in these discussions. So, there’s big you know, those are the three big headlines. But I also believe there’s some, you know, big opportunities there to engage those different stakeholders and working together to address all of this.

DOUG: Yeah. One of the interesting things we were talking about previously, one of the many, I should say, interesting things that we were talking about previously was the connection between animal health and diseases that then start affecting the human population. Can you maybe talk a bit about how this approach sort of keeps that top of mind?

TISH: Yeah. So that we’re talking when we talk about that, we’re talking about zoonotic diseases, which is a really big part of animal health. Vector diseases are real threats right now to animals as well. So, when you think about things, you know, that we’ve all heard of, right? Swine flu, bird flu or avian flu, things like that. But just most more recently with the Covid pandemic, right, we all learned that the that that started or possibly started with that and moved into humans and with climate change, right. With the earth warming things like that happening with people moving around the Earth more frequently than we have in the past. So, we have to have a health system, that is ready for that, that’s ready to meet the needs of the communities, and respond to that so that we are optimizing our health systems at all those different levels. I talked about local, regional, national, and global.

DOUG: Yeah. And since I just gave you an entry into talking about global pandemics, maybe we can try and end on a more optimistic note. What makes you optimistic about the idea of one health growing and having more impact?

TISH: Personally, 15 years ago, I wasn’t thinking about how my health was connected to the health of the environment and the health of animals and how that works together. I think our knowledge building that knowledge, sharing that knowledge, interacting with each other, bringing these different stakeholder communities together, there’s a real opportunity and hope that we will be able to face these tougher health challenges of the future.

DOUG: Yeah, and it’s great. I commend you for leading the way on this. Thanks so much for sharing your ideas.

TISH: Thanks, Doug. We’re thrilled about the work we’re doing, and we’re thrilled to be sharing it with others.