One Health for a Better World

Adam Kamradt-Scott’s journey to academia began somewhere unexpected: the emergency room. 

Kamradt-Scott began his career as a Registered Nurse, a role which directly informs his work today as Associate Professor of One Health Diplomacy at The Fletcher School. A self-described pragmatist, he sees that powerful and responsive health policy results from the marriage of theory and practice.

His career has taken him both across sectors and across the world. While he was a nurse in Australia, he paid close attention to the news and wondered why the country was not doing more to support East Timor gain independence. Seeking a greater understanding of global politics, he returned to school and orchestrated a major pivot into international relations. 

“I started full-time study again in Asian and international affairs and international business,” said Kamradt-Scott. “Once I started my master’s, I opted to merge the two areas of specialty and looked at international relations and health. In that context, I focused on the human security implications of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases.”

Testing Pandemic Preparedness in Australia 

As Kamradt-Scott began his career in public health, he joined the Australian Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to run a national exercise program to test the country’s pandemic preparedness and recovery. The program, Exercise Sustain 08, took a comprehensive look at the non-health sector impacts arising from a pandemic.  

“We were looking at industry impacts, critical infrastructure, and how businesses would respond,” said Kamradt-Scott. “If you end up losing a third of your workforce to some sort of pathogen, what are the impacts going to be, and how do you recover from that?”

The exercise led Kamradt-Scott into an in-depth investigation of Australia’s second, third, and fourth order impacts and how they could be mitigated effectively.  

“One of the factors that we identified was the prospect of requiring people to go into lockdowns, and how that would then be conducted,” he said. “If you insist that people can't go to work, what's going to be the impact on their income? How do they pay their mortgages or get food? How do their kids still continue to have an education?”

By engaging different sectors in these discussions, the team looked at civil society organizations for delivering food to the elderly. In the event of a pandemic, though, it was identified the scale would need to be much greater. 

“We started engaging our supermarkets, and as a result of some of those discussions, a few years later, the supermarket chains began implementing home delivery systems, which were then in place when the coronavirus pandemic hit.” 

At the time, Kamradt-Scott was back in academia. 

“The Australian government approached me and asked for assistance,” he said. “As a former emergency nurse, my inclination was to do that.”

He left the University of Sydney and worked as an advisor for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as well as the World Bank. 

One Health for a Better World 

In his new post at Fletcher, Kamradt-Scott will conduct research and teach on One Health, a field he holds very close to heart.  

“I've always been intrigued by the question of, ‘how did we get here,’” he said. “Even though I'd trained as a nurse, I'd never heard about the 1918 Spanish flu. Everyone knows about it now, but for a number of years it was forgotten.” 

“That's one of our risks with Covid,” he added. “People become mentally exhausted by the experience and want to move on. This is what we refer to as the cycle of panic and neglect in pandemic preparedness.” 

One Health brings an integrated perspective to health policy, seeking to bridge understanding between disciplines in order to find more dynamic and sustainable policy solutions for a healthy world.

“If we want to prevent future pandemics and incidents that impact human health, we really need to take a much more comprehensive perspective,” said Kamradt-Scott.

“We need to start looking at what's happening in the animal world and the environmental world, and how that's impacting human health,” he added. “For me, that's what encapsulates One Health. It's taking that broader integrated perspective, thinking about the synergies and the crossovers between the species that live on this planet.” 

Just as he seeks to integrate disciplines through One Health, he also aims to work as a practitioner from within academia. 

“I'm interested in using theory as a tool to make sure that we've got better policy outcomes,” he said. “One of the motivating factors in being an academic has always been the question of how we take this information and use that to generate better outcomes for folks around the world.”

Read more about Fletcher’s Human Security and Humanitarian Affairs field of study.