Healthy Wildlife, Healthy Lives – A One Health Project
The ‘Healthy Wildlife Healthy Lives’ – A One Health Project aims to educate you about parasitic and other diseases in urban wildlife. You may know that you can catch diseases from wildlife. Did you know that you or your pets can give parasitic diseases to wildlife too? This can be through simple actions like feeding wildlife in the backyard. The project provides science based information on how to keep the wildlife you may meet in your backyard healthy.
What is One Health?
‘One Health’ is a global initiative that recognises the health of people, animals and the environment are all directly linked. ‘One Health’ promotes the health and wellness of all species. ‘One Health’ has become more important as people have more contact with wildlife. This contact has caused diseases that spread between animals and people to develop or re-emerge.
Reporting parasitic disease in wildlife
You can help researchers to improve the existing level of knowledge about parasitic disease in wildlife. If you are involved in wildlife rehabilitation, the Healthy Wildlife team invite you to report wildlife with suspected parasitic disease. The data will be used to improve wildlife health, conserve the environment, and encourage healthy interaction between people and unique wildlife.
Help keep wildlife healthy for a healthier world
Australia’s unique native wildlife is being put at risk by unintentionally harmful human behaviour. Healthy wildlife is an integral part of overall health and wellbeing in communities. When you keep wildlife healthy, you help keep humans and domestic animals healthy. Simple actions like feeding wildlife inappropriate food in your backyard can be harmful.
One Health is a global initiative that recognises the health of humans, animals and the environment are all directly linked. One Health promotes the health and wellness of all species.
Healthy Wildlife, Healthy Lives aims to educate the community about One Health, with a focus on human and domestic animal’s contact with wildlife in urban areas. There is an increasing interaction between humans, domestic animals and wildlife in urban areas due to habitat loss and urban encroachment on native bushland. Wildlife are now venturing into backyards looking for new places to live and food to eat.
Many humans enjoy contact with wildlife. Our interactions with wildlife can affect their health positively or negatively. Creating habitat can help wildlife. Wildlife can get diseases from humans and pets. There are simple changes that you can make, or things that you can do, to help protect native wildlife in your backyard.
Interacting positively with wildlife will benefit wildlife, domestic animals and humans.
Healthy Wildlife = Healthy Communities