Dr. Thomas Sollecito Joins Discussion on Antibiotic Resistance as Part of One Health Symposium
Dr. Thomas Sollecito
Philadelphia – Students from Penn Vet’s One Health Club brought faculty and students from across the Penn campus together for its second annual One Health Symposium, One Health in Practice 2019, with Penn Dental Medicine’s Dr. Thomas Sollecito, Chair and Professor of Oral Medicine, participating as a featured panelist.
The week-long event, which ran October 21 through 25, was designed to highlight interdisciplinary education and collaboration between the 12 graduate schools of the University of Pennsylvania and to promote the One Health concept, which seeks to improve the health of all species by increasing collaboration between human, animal, and environmental health specialists. The symposium included lectures and discussions varying from current healthcare research to zoonotic disease outbreaks.
On October 23, Dr. Sollecito was part of the “Antimicrobial Resistance Panel,” an interdisciplinary discussion on global antibiotic resistance.
“Antibiotics should only be used when necessary. Overuse contributes to the population-wide problem of antibiotic resistance. We all need to be better stewards of these life-saving drugs,” says Dr. Sollecito, who in 2015, chaired a committee of the American Dental Association’s (ADA) Council on Scientific Affairs, which led a review that resulted in the ADA issuing a revised clinical practice guideline regarding prophylactic antibiotics for patients with hip and knee prosthetic joint implants undergoing dental procedures. It stated that, in general, it is not recommended that patients with joint replacements receive antibiotics before dental procedures.
Events of the symposium were held throughout the Penn campus to encourage students to explore the schools beyond their own classrooms, with Penn Dental Medicine hosting the lecture, “One Health Perspective on Food Security in the 21st Century” on October 22.
Advancing the One Health concept, The Dr. Thomas P. Sollecito One Health Fellowship in Oral Medicine was established in 2018, providing financial support for educational programming within Penn Dental Medicine’s Department of Oral Medicine for veterinary dentists or oral medicine fellows with an interest in veterinary oral medicine.