By Meeri Kim<\/p>\n
As a young boy in Western Kenya,\u00a0Robert Onsare<\/a>\u00a0bore witness to the devastating effects of foodborne pathogens. His village in Kisii County lacked proper sanitation and wash facilities, which led to many families \u2014 including his close relatives \u2014 falling victim to foodborne illness.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d says Onsare. \u201cI saw close relatives get sick, and some of them died.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u00a0Centre for Microbiology Research<\/a>\u00a0at the\u00a0Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI)<\/a>.\u00a0KEMRI, the medical research arm of the Kenyan government, ranks as\u00a0a leading health research institution in Africa and globally.<\/p>\n Onsare, who also heads KEMRI\u2019s\u00a0One Health Research Program<\/a>\u00a0as 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.<\/p>\n Recent studies include a genomic analysis of\u00a0invasive, multidrug-resistant Salmonella<\/a>, a disease with high mortality rates in Kenya; the\u00a0epidemiology and genomics of invasive Nontyphoidal Salmonella infections in Kenya<\/a>; understanding the dynamics of\u00a0infection and carriage of typhoid<\/a>\u00a0among children living in a Nairobi settlement; a method of\u00a0freeze drying Campylobacter bacteriophages<\/a>\u00a0to extend product shelf-life and transport range; and\u00a0a\u00a0Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)<\/a>\/World Health Organization (WHO)<\/a>\u00a0report on\u00a0improving food safety in meat value chains in Kenya<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cFoodborne diseases are treatable, but in areas similar to where I grew up, they aren\u2019t able to be detected. There are no labs or facilities, and no expertise,\u201d Onsare says. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n With\u00a0Catherine Nkirote Kunyanga<\/a>, associate professor at the University of Nairobi, he is leading a project funded by the\u00a0Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety<\/a>\u00a0to improve food security and nutrition in Kenya.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen 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,\u201d he says. \u201cUnsafe food, which is mainly driven by foodborne disease, prevents nutrition development and also economic development.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cRight 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,\u201d he says. \u201cThe results of this project will serve as a very good reference point to have something to compare with any future data.\u201d<\/p>\n Next, the researchers plan to analyze Salmonella and Campylobacter\u00a0strains to genetically characterize a pathogen\u2019s ability to cause human disease. They will prepare DNA extractions of Salmonella and Campylobacter\u00a0isolates and perform whole-genome sequencing to better understand the pathogens and how they interact with the human body.<\/p>\n \u201cWe also plan to conduct whole metagenomic sequencing of wastewater streams from various parts of the country,\u201d says Onsare. \u201cOur objective is to identify the foodborne pathogens that most severely affect our population.\u201d<\/p>\n Onsare was drawn to science from an early age \u2014 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\u00a0Egerton University<\/a>, 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\u00a0Jomo Kenyatta University of Technology (JKUAT)<\/a>, another public university in Central Kenya.<\/p>\n Two years later, Onsare was awarded a scholarship from the European Union to pursue a \u201csandwich Ph.D. program\u201d \u2014 meaning he split his time between two institutions \u2014 in medical microbiology at JKUAT and the Novartis Vaccines Institute for Global Health in Italy (now known as the\u00a0GSK Vaccines Institute for Global Health<\/a>). 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\u00a0University of Nairobi<\/a>, graduating in 2018.<\/p>\n He credits his parents \u2014 his father, a local national government administrator, and his mother, initially a teacher and later a local government administrator, both strict disciplinarians \u2014 for emphasizing the importance of education and setting him on a path toward achieving his career goals.<\/p>\n \u201cMy parents were very keen and passionate, and they sacrificed a lot to send me to school,\u201d says Onsare. \u201cOne 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.\u201d<\/p>\n During his free time, Onsare loves hiking and proudly adds that in July 2022, \u00a0he summitted Mt. Kilimanjaro, the\u00a0highest mountain in Africa<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0highest single, free-standing mountain above sea level<\/a>\u00a0in the world, in addition to summiting other smaller mountains in Kenya.<\/p>\n Meeri Kim is a freelance writer with the\u00a0Feed 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\u00a0<\/em>Feed the Future<\/em>, the U.S. government\u2019s global hunger and food security initiative led by\u00a0<\/em>USAID<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Meeri Kim As a young boy in Western Kenya,\u00a0Robert Onsare\u00a0bore witness to the devastating effects of foodborne pathogens. His village in Kisii County lacked proper sanitation and wash facilities, which led to many families \u2014 including his close relatives \u2014 falling victim to foodborne illness. \u201cI grew up in a rural setting where poverty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":1658,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-researcher-profiles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1657"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2467,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions\/2467"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}