The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced last month that Tufts' Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine will receive part of a $185 million grant to help improve training for handling infectious disease outbreaks.
The grant will go toward the RESPOND Project, a program designed to help high-risk countries prepare to deal efficiently with emerging infectious diseases.
Cummings veterinarians and several other faculty members within Tufts' health sciences campuses received a portion of the money as part of their participation in RESPOND. Other recipients include the project's lead firm DAI, a company based in Bethesda, Md. that works on developmental issues, the University of Minnesota and several other organizations.
The goal of RESPOND will be to review and develop curricula to enable citizens in high-risk areas to gain skills designed to improve surveillance of and response to emerging zoonotic disease, which can be transferred between animals and humans.
The areas that the RESPOND Project will likely be working in include the Congo Basin, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Amazon Basin, according to Robyn Alders, associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Population Health at the Cummings School.
"We want to emphasize that the majority of this money will be used to build capacity in partner countries," said Joann Lindenmayer, also an associate professor in Cummings' population health department.
RESPOND is one of five projects that comprise the USAID-sponsored Emerging Pandemic Threats program. Other parts of the program include PREDICT, IDENTIFY, PREPARE and PREVENT — all of which seek to enhance procedures surrounding reaction to and control of emerging diseases, according to Alders.
RESPOND taps into Cummings' "One Health" initiative, a multidisciplinary approach to health issues.
Alders will be leading the Tufts team. Other Tufts-affiliated workers involved include Felicia Nutter, a Cummings School graduate and the Senior Technical Officer at DAI, who will help oversee the project, and faculty and staff members from the Tufts School of Medicine and Feinstein International Center, according to Cummings spokesperson Tom Keppeler.
"While we will be doing research, it will not just be affecting veterinary medicine. This is an opportunity to make ‘One Health' tangible," Alders said.
Dean of the Cummings School Deborah Kochevar echoed this point.
"The RESPOND grant represents a wonderful opportunity for all three Tufts campuses to collaborate and contribute to global health. This successful bid was driven by resources from across the University," Kochevar said in an e-mail. "The Cummings School has a reputation for excellence in infectious disease research and, through the work of the RESPOND grant, will extend that and renew its commitment to the ‘One Health' concept upon which the school was founded."
While swine flu has recently made news, the emerging diseases that RESPOND will focus on remain largely unknown.
"We don't know what we're going to find," Alders said. "It's swine flu today, six months ago it was Avian influenza, and before that it was SARS. The idea is to build capacity so that people can respond to emerging diseases of importance in their countries."
Nutter will provide technical and strategic leadership in the integration of wildlife epidemiology training, according to Robert Salerno, the communication and reporting officer for RESPOND.
"The program is designed to build institutional capacity across hot-spot regions to work with and prevent future pandemics," Salerno told the Daily.
Alders agreed that RESPOND has the potential to offer long-term benefits worldwide.
"Improved global human and animal health capacity will help to keep all of us safer," she said.
Kochevar said that Cummings' integral participation in the program is a testament to the school's work.
"We are very proud of our faculty's ability to form a talented and collaborative team and look forward to the RESPOND work getting underway," she said.
