Chapter 7 - Public health microbiomics

ABSTRACT

The current challenge in public health monitoring is the extended spectrum of agents that actually inhabit or may enter the human community and become pathogenic and/or virulent due to a number of diverse reasons the climate change alters the ambient temperature and humidity;the deterioration of health and health care, for any and all applicable reason(s) allows aggressive communicable patterns;advances in synthetic biology increase the danger of custom-engineered microbiota for legitimate and nefarious purposes;and massive migration/travel and transportation movements disperse microbiota and reshuffle local microbiomes in receiving countries. Thus, new microbiota have to be processed on a regular basis, so as to be included in monitoring and surveillance practice. The latter is challenged with an unprecedented range of pathogens and more aggressive outbreaks. The One Health-One Planet, One Health-One Humanity, and One Health-One Ecohealth concepts, enjoying different levels of consensus, strive to create a protective blanket by different cognitive and technical/methodological approaches against different emergence and transmission pathways of pathogens. Preferably decentralized and transdisciplinary, multisectorial applicability in plant, animal, and human pathogen monitoring, across the grid, implemented by common but adaptable platforms using genomic and postgenomic technological breakthroughs, such as portable instrumentation and very long-read sequencing, pave the way for adaptive, massive testing with limited upfront costs.