By Meeri Kim

As a young boy in Western Kenya, Robert Onsare bore witness to the devastating effects of foodborne pathogens. His village in Kisii County lacked proper sanitation and wash facilities, which led to many families — including his close relatives — falling victim to foodborne illness.

“I grew up in a rural setting where poverty is very common. One of the key challenges that existed then and still continues to be a problem is foodborne pathogens,” says Onsare. “I saw close relatives get sick, and some of them died.”

The harrowing experiences instilled in him a passion to fight the spread of foodborne pathogens in his home country. Today, he serves as a senior research scientist in the Centre for Microbiology Research at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI). KEMRI, the medical research arm of the Kenyan government, ranks as a leading health research institution in Africa and globally.

Onsare, who also heads KEMRI’s One Health Research Program as acting deputy director, specializes in food safety and antimicrobial resistance. One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral and transdisciplinary approach that includes veterinary medicine, human medicine, biology, ecology and other fields. He leverages the One Health approach in his work to examine the interaction between human, animal and environmental health in order to address diseases, particularly ones that spread from animals to humans.

Recent studies include a genomic analysis of invasive, multidrug-resistant Salmonella, a disease with high mortality rates in Kenya; the epidemiology and genomics of invasive Nontyphoidal Salmonella infections in Kenya; understanding the dynamics of infection and carriage of typhoid among children living in a Nairobi settlement; a method of freeze drying Campylobacter bacteriophages to extend product shelf-life and transport range; and a Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)/World Health Organization (WHO) report on improving food safety in meat value chains in Kenya.

“Foodborne diseases are treatable, but in areas similar to where I grew up, they aren’t able to be detected. There are no labs or facilities, and no expertise,” Onsare says. “I became passionate about finding ways to detect these foodborne pathogens and ensuring that any food taken in my community is actually safe. That is what drove me.”

With Catherine Nkirote Kunyanga, associate professor at the University of Nairobi, he is leading a project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety to improve food security and nutrition in Kenya.

“When you look at the literature, the foodborne disease burden in Kenya is estimated to be about five times greater than countries in the Americas and about 17 times greater than countries in Europe,” he says. “Unsafe food, which is mainly driven by foodborne disease, prevents nutrition development and also economic development.”

The main focus of the project is a baseline microbial food safety assessment of the Kenyan poultry value chain. Poultry is an important dietary component for poor and middle-class Kenyan households, but the transmission of pathogenic Salmonella and Campylobacter bacteria presents a significant risk of foodborne disease.

First, Onsare and his colleagues will determine Salmonella and Campylobacter prevalence across the poultry value chain to establish contamination levels and also to determine potential intervention strategies.

“Right now, we do not have country-specific data on foodborne pathogens that we can refer to, in order to see the impact of interventions or education,” he says. “The results of this project will serve as a very good reference point to have something to compare with any future data.”

Next, the researchers plan to analyze Salmonella and Campylobacter strains to genetically characterize a pathogen’s ability to cause human disease. They will prepare DNA extractions of Salmonella and Campylobacter isolates and perform whole-genome sequencing to better understand the pathogens and how they interact with the human body.

“We also plan to conduct whole metagenomic sequencing of wastewater streams from various parts of the country,” says Onsare. “Our objective is to identify the foodborne pathogens that most severely affect our population.”

Onsare was drawn to science from an early age — in particular, biology and chemistry. After attending one of the top-performing high schools in the neighboring Luo Nyanza region, he majored in biological sciences at the prestigious Egerton University, a public university in Kenya, known for its excellence in training agriculture, animal and human health and technology professionals. Upon graduating in 2008, Onsare enrolled in a Master of Science program in medical microbiology at Jomo Kenyatta University of Technology (JKUAT), another public university in Central Kenya.

Two years later, Onsare was awarded a scholarship from the European Union to pursue a “sandwich Ph.D. program” — meaning he split his time between two institutions — in medical microbiology at JKUAT and the Novartis Vaccines Institute for Global Health in Italy (now known as the GSK Vaccines Institute for Global Health). He joined KEMRI in 2007 after receiving his Ph.D. at the age of 33, becoming the youngest member of staff then to receive a Ph.D. in his department, the Centre for Microbiology Research. To further acquire management skills, Onsare registered for a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree majoring in strategic management at the University of Nairobi, graduating in 2018.

He credits his parents — his father, a local national government administrator, and his mother, initially a teacher and later a local government administrator, both strict disciplinarians — for emphasizing the importance of education and setting him on a path toward achieving his career goals.

“My parents were very keen and passionate, and they sacrificed a lot to send me to school,” says Onsare. “One of the ways I promised myself to appreciate that effort is to be successful, do well in school and come back into our community to be able to help in terms of food safety.”

During his free time, Onsare loves hiking and proudly adds that in July 2022,  he summitted Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa and the highest single, free-standing mountain above sea level in the world, in addition to summiting other smaller mountains in Kenya.

Meeri Kim is a freelance writer with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety. The Innovation Lab is one of a network of 20 such labs led by U.S. universities under Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative led by USAID.