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Hello and welcome to Health Check from the BBC.
I'm Claudia Hammond and today I'm in Malawi and I'm with some vets from the Lilongwe Society for the Protection and Care of Animals.
And I'm here to explore a concept known as One Health, where expertise is shared between human and veterinary medicine.
And we're out in a village in the community, there's only, I don't know, 10 minutes from Lilongwe, and loads of people have gathered and one of the things they're going to be doing today is having their dogs vaccinated against rabies, which of course is going to help people as well as helping those dogs.
And they're having other things done to their dogs too.
But lots of people have turned up with their dogs on chains as leads and are patiently waiting for it to be their turn.
And I want to talk to one of the vets here, Maddie Niamwanza, to find out more about what One.
The idea of One Health is bringing stakeholders together in veterinary health and medicine, human health and medicine and environment health together, in order to ensure that we have healthy people and healthy animals.
And is it more for the people or more for the animals, or is the idea that it's both?
It should be for everyone.
It should be for everyone.
Yeah.
But I think what we tend to see is that because it's a new concept we are learning on the go.
I remember in 2016, there was a One Health consortium, a task force which was set up in order to advance One Health.
So that constituted of lspca.
It also had Public Health Institute of Malawi.
It also had the Department of Animal Health and Livestock Development.
It also had the Ministry of Health.
So we came together and we started talking about One Health.