Rx One Health alum: Jessicah Kurere

Jessicah Kurere is a Kenyan veterinarian working with Vetinwild and Ewaso Lions with special interest in disease surveillance at the interface between domestic and wild carnivores in Northern Kenya.

What prompted you to pursue your career path?

I am from a pastoralist community and we have a lot of livestock. We live in a very rural area so there is a lot of livestock and scarce resources including access to veterinary services. So I am one of the very few veterinarians coming from my local area. That was my passion - to support my community.

What made you apply for Rx One Health?

I wanted to challenge myself to deepen and broaden my thinking about One Health, so it was very interesting to me - not only to get scientific knowledge but also to learn from a diverse pool of individuals that come together who are my age and also inter-generational.

What is your key takeaway from the course so far?

I come from a pastoralist community that is very dry, so semi-arid. We don’t have any oceans or seas so it’s been really exciting and cool to learn about marine life and aspects of climate change affecting their health from a one health perspective, learning about sea otters, sea lions, seals, and crabs and getting to see them for the first time…and learning in-depth about how One Health interconnects to their health and the health of the people living here.

How can you apply what you learned here at home or in your work?

In very many ways - one of the things that I really loved was on communications. We have a knowledge but how do we communicate it to the people around us who do not necessarily understand what One Health is or understand what health challenges are.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to an aspiring One Health learner? 

I would say that as we are talking about climate change and One Health, things really keep evolving the same way we keep evolving in our careers. When I started out, I was doing conservation of snakes and now i’m doing something with lions and i do a lot with dogs and i’m interested in policy. And in a few years I may be doing disease modeling. So as you can see, we keep evolving as individuals the same way our planet is evolving and we are facing new threats and new challenges. I would say, be open-minded to keep learning, be open-minded to make mistakes, and be open-minded to keep evolving and growing so that we’re able to adapt to new challenges and be open-minded to address them in various ways.