HOH Helsinki One Health facilitates the generating and sharing of knowledge on human, animal and environmental health, and disease, and their connections.
Helsinki One Health key research areas include food safety, animal health and welfare, and translational medicine, where the latterfocuses on utilizing companion animals (dogs, cats, horses) to develop new diagnostics, treatments, and therapies that benefit both veterinary and human medicine.
In PAWWS, we apply the One Health approach when training medical alert dogs and supporting their owners with medical conditions. We train medical alert dogs to sense upcoming medical episodes, giving individuals valuable time to rest or take needed medication before symptoms arise.
Our prior research has shown that trained dogs can smell incredibly low concentrations (down to 10-21-23)(Turunen et al. 2024) and that their sensitivity and specificity in SARS-CoV-2 was way over 90% (Kantele et al. 2022).
The One Welfare/Wellbeing approach brings the interconnections between animal welfare, human wellbeing, animal and human disease, and the physical and social environment together.
PAWWS develops novel, in-depth knowledge of the interconnections between human and animal wellbeing in human-animal work contexts, including building new guidelines and reforms that aim to promote multispecies wellbeing and ethical treatment of animals.