When Solutions Start with Listening

Sometimes the best medicine is just listening.

We’ve found this over and over again in this podcast – doctors, public health workers, ecologists, and other people working in the One Health field struggle to solve some seemingly complicated problem, and then find it’s pretty straightforward when they stop and really listen to the people they’re trying to help.

Whether it’s parents worried about vaccines harming their children; residents suspicious of foreigners who say they want to help screen for a new disease that’s spreading, or farmers struggling to work with veterinarians to keep their livestock healthy, people all have their own expertise, experience, and motivation. The so-called experts need to pay attention.

Dr. Eri Togami learned some of this working in Rwanda, Tanzania, Cambodia, and elsewhere. She’s a veterinarian and epidemiologist who’s now working on her PhD in environmental health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering.

In just one example, Togami says, she assumed farmers whose pigs were affected by a parasitic disease called cysticercosis would sell their animals readily. It was only after listening to them at length that she learned the pigs were actually valuable, long-term investments held against hard times.

Listen as she chats with One World, One Health about what else she’s learning as she works in the classroom and in the field.

Guest

Dr. Eri Togami is an epidemiologist, veterinarian, and PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She uses statistics, interviews, and implementation research to study how people perceive the risk of zoonotic diseases and how medical interventions can be better accepted by community members in Rwanda. Her research is nested in a randomized controlled trial that aims to prevent and control cysticercosis in people and pigs. 

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, she conducted surveillance and outbreak response for infectious diseases, including COVID-19 and Ebola, at the World Health Organization (WHO) Headquarters in Geneva, WHO Western Pacific Regional Office in the Philippines, and WHO Fiji Office. She also worked on a USAID-funded, early-warning virus surveillance project, named PREDICT, at the University of California, Davis. 

She obtained her degree in veterinary medicine from Nippon Veterinary and Life Science University in Japan, Master of Public Health from Yale School of Public Health, and a One Health fellowship at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. She is a member of the One Health Action Collaborative at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.