OHRP Explained Question by Question — Founding, Government Funding, Ambulatory Pig-and-Chicken Vets, and International Role

This article is part of Module 11 "Medicine / Hospitals" (Part 2, second instalment) of the City University of Hong Kong Wild History Archive. Cross-references: biomedical-and-health-sciences.md (the biomedical college, and why CityU has no medical school), veterinary-college.md (the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences, JCC).

CityU's Centre for Applied One Health Research and Policy Advice (OHRP) was founded in October 2016^※ under the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences. Working from the framework that "human, animal and environmental health are a single trinity", it dispatches ambulatory veterinary teams to more than 1,200 farming and fishery sites across Hong Kong, and supplies evidence-based policy advice to the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH/OIE) and other international bodies — making it the territory's broadest-reaching public-health-oriented veterinary outreach operation.

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# What is "One Health", and why did CityU set up a dedicated centre for it?

The "One Health" idea holds that human health, animal health and the health of the environment are inseparable. Controlling zoonotic diseases (avian influenza, African swine fever), curbing antimicrobial resistance and safeguarding food safety must all be tackled at the intersection of these three systems; neither human medicine nor veterinary medicine alone is sufficient.

At CityU, this framework has a specific institutional background: the University's Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC)^※ was established in 2014 and is Hong Kong's only veterinary school (see veterinary-college.md; the story of how it acquired and expanded its teaching hospital, CityU VMC, out of a Peace Avenue clinic into Southeast Asia's largest veterinary centre is in veterinary-college-3.md). But JCC is more than clinics and classrooms — according to the OHRP website^※, the Centre's mission is "to generate scientific knowledge that will drive the development of evidence-based policies at local, national, regional and international levels to prevent and control infectious animal diseases that impact human health and the production, welfare and health of animals." In other words, OHRP is JCC's outward-facing policy-and-service arm: it turns knowledge produced in the laboratory and the consulting room into actions a farm can take, and policy recommendations an international agency can cite.

Put the pig, chicken and fish services side by side, and the three wings look superficially different — yet their public-health substance is strikingly alike:

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# When was OHRP founded, and who leads it?

OHRP was established in October 2016^※, under the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences.

It is led by Professor Dirk Udo Pfeiffer^※, whose current titles are "Tsu Dan Fung Professor of One Health" and "Director, OHRP". Professor Pfeiffer holds a Tierarzt (veterinary medicine), Dr.med.vet., PhD, MANZCVSc and DipECVPH, among other qualifications. An internationally known veterinary epidemiologist, he was previously a professor at the UK's Royal Veterinary College and currently chairs the Applied Epidemiology Technical Working Group of the OIE/FAO avian-influenza network (OFFLU).

According to a Times Higher Education interview with the Centre^※, Pfeiffer earned his veterinary degree in Germany in 1984, completed his PhD at Massey University in New Zealand in 1994, held a chair in veterinary epidemiology at the Royal Veterinary College from 1999, and joined CityU as Tsu Dan Fung Professor in 2016 — almost exactly when OHRP was set up. The Centre was, in effect, built around the research programme of a senior epidemiologist. He regards antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as the number-one threat, telling the same interviewer bluntly that AMR is "a bigger problem than the Covid-19 pandemic" — a judgement that also explains why reducing antibiotic dependence on farms sits at the core of all of OHRP's farm services.

The aquaculture side is headed by Professor Sophie St-Hilaire^※, now department chair of the Department of Infectious Diseases and Public Health. She holds a DVM, an MSc and PhD in veterinary epidemiology, and an MBA, and is a licensed practitioner as well as an academic.

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# Where did the ambulatory veterinary service come from, and how much government funding does it receive?

OHRP's outreach veterinary services are funded directly by the Hong Kong SAR government. According to a CityU press release of 7 January 2019^※, the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) awarded a total of HK$35 million under its Sustainable Agricultural Development Fund and Sustainable Fisheries Development Fund to support the following three research-and-service projects, each lasting two years:

All three projects aim, in the words of the same press release, to "combine veterinary services and research for the industry to ensure animal health and food safety for the people of Hong Kong". It quotes Pfeiffer saying the goal is "to improve farm productivity, animal welfare and food safety, and to prevent the emergence of zoonotic diseases."

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# How do the ambulatory vets go about visiting pig and poultry farms?

CityU's ambulatory veterinary services page^※ explains that OHRP's ambulatory vet team visits farms on request to examine terrestrial and aquatic production animals and help address animal-health and production needs, so that farmers can respond "more quickly and cost-effectively" to a range of animal-health and production problems. The overall aim is to work with farmers to find disease-prevention solutions and improve the sustainability of their farms.

Take the pig project as an example: OHRP serves 43 participating pig farms (according to a JCC press release^※). Notably, a 2023 academic paper in BMC Veterinary Research^※ used a mixed-method design of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires to survey nine pig farmers in Hong Kong's New Territories (a 24% response rate from 38 active farms): the median herd size was 2,800 head (range 950–7,000), all operating an integrated farrow-to-finish model. Farmers broadly bought into the idea behind CityU's service, but concerns about a lack of local experience and language ability were also recorded — the paper itself being an instance of OHRP's habit of turning service experience into peer-reviewed research.

How big is the industry OHRP is serving? Using 2019 data, the same 2023 BMC Veterinary Research paper^※ counts 40 pig farms still in operation, run by 38 pig farmers, with a median herd size of around 2,800 head and total annual throughput of about 100,000 pigs — but these local pigs supply only around 14% of Hong Kong's pork, with the remaining 86% imported. In other words, the 43 participating farms OHRP serves (a figure that includes some double-counting across project phases) protect an industry that is small in scale yet carries a dual role: supplying local fresh meat and acting as a biosecurity sentinel. The paper groups the difficulties farmers face into three categories: regulatory constraints (farm infrastructure held back by outdated rules that are hard to upgrade), insufficient veterinary support (slow government responses, limited specialist capacity) and threats to the industry's survival (poor public perception, labour shortages, mainland competition). One interviewed farmer's own words capture the reality from which the service starts: "The problem is that in Hong Kong now there is no one that can teach us how to do so."^※ — OHRP's ambulatory vets fill exactly that "nobody comes to us" gap. Yet the same study records a "cautiously optimistic" attitude shot through with scepticism: farmers welcomed someone turning up, but questioned whether CityU vets really understood local husbandry and worried about language barriers. This archive sets the official "ground-breaking" narrative side by side with the frictions documented in the academic record, without adjudicating.

On the poultry side, 28 farms^※ participate. According to a Times Higher Education report^※, Pfeiffer's team's routine work includes on-farm visits, clinical services, biosecurity assessments, and sample collection from water, broilers and breeding stock — for pathogen detection and antimicrobial-resistance (AMR) surveillance. All collected samples are sent for testing to the CityU Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (CityU VDL; see veterinary-college-2.md). One of the two projects' core public-health tasks is helping farmers reduce their reliance on antimicrobials and so curb the spread of AMR at the farm end of the chain.

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# How did the poultry project evolve from PHAP to a "production management" phase?

The poultry outreach was not a one-off grant but ran in two consecutive phases. According to an implementation case study published in One Health Cases (2024)^※, OHRP, together with the AFCD, the Hong Kong Chicken Breeders Association and CityU VDL, ran two projects in succession: the "Poultry Health Assurance Project (PHAP)", which operated from 2019 to 2022, followed by the "Poultry Health and Production Management Project" from 2022 to 2024, providing veterinary services cumulatively to about 29 local chicken farms. The first phase focused on building a closed clinical loop of "disease detection — diagnosis — prevention and control"; the second shifted the emphasis towards production efficiency and data-driven management. The name change from "health assurance" to "production management" in itself marks the service's transition from putting out fires to supporting day-to-day operations.

To standardise production records scattered across individual farms, the team developed a mobile app called the "Broiler Record APP", used to collect husbandry data and monitor farm performance. The point of such a tool is this: only when medication use, mortality and weight gain for each batch of broilers are recorded in structured form is there a comparable baseline for AMR surveillance and biosecurity assessment — and "fewer antibiotics" stops being a slogan and becomes a verifiable curve. The pathogens the poultry project focuses on, according to a CityU Department of Infectious Diseases and Public Health introduction^※, are concentrated on avian influenza, and on food-borne bacteria such as Campylobacter and Salmonella, plus the resistance bred by antibiotic misuse — precisely the public-health risk points on the "farm-to-table" chain that sit closest to ordinary citizens.

According to the same One Health Cases implementation study^※, partners in the two poultry phases also include the Hong Kong Chicken Breeders Association — AFCD supplying funding and policy, the Association contributing trust and channels, CityU VDL the testing capacity, and OHRP the vets and research: four parties working together to get the service into local chicken farms. The project also launched a free newsletter and continuing-education seminar series called the "Poultry News-Technology Promotion Information Plan", carrying the latest husbandry techniques and disease-prevention knowledge to farmers and answering the perennial problem of farm staff having "nowhere to study".

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# After the two two-year projects were "completed", what took over?

The pig and chicken two-year projects launched in 2019 did not simply end. According to the OHRP ambulatory veterinary services master page^※, both "Improving pig health and production in Hong Kong" and "Improving poultry health and production in Hong Kong" are now marked "completed" — but two newly named follow-on projects have taken their place: "Introduction of Advanced Health Management Tools for Enhanced Pig Production, Product Safety and Quality in Hong Kong", and "State-of-the-Art Health Management for Improved Poultry Production, Product Safety and Quality in Hong Kong" — again supported by the AFCD's Sustainable Agricultural Development Fund, with Professor Pfeiffer still as principal investigator. The fish project, by contrast, has not been renamed; it continues under its original title "Improving fish health and production in Hong Kong" with no "completed" mark.

The change of name alone signals the shift of emphasis: the early projects' key phrase was "health and production"; the successors add "product safety and quality" — moving from "first get the disease under control and the farm stabilised" to "bring the safety and quality of pork and chicken, from the farm to the citizen's table, within the veterinarian's remit." According to the poultry follow-on project page^※, the team includes, besides Professor Pfeiffer, Dr. Denis Yau and Dr. Ling Shan Tsang. Their work covers on-farm inspection, sampling and laboratory diagnosis; customised health-management plans for individual farms; electronic production-record systems to strengthen biosecurity; promoting prudent antibiotic use; and developing a "Hong Kong Quality Poultry" brand-certification scheme — turning "passing farm" from an internal management metric into a label consumers can recognise in the market.

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# How does the fishery ambulatory service cover more than a thousand aquaculture sites across Hong Kong?

The fish health project^※ is led by Professor St-Hilaire. Its coverage, according to a JCC press release^※, extends to all 945 marine fish culture sites and 332 freshwater pond fish culture sites in Hong Kong, helping fish farmers deal with pathogens, parasites and harmful algal blooms, and providing on-site veterinary services to complement the AFCD's "health inspection scheme".

In practice, Professor St-Hilaire has assembled a team of two part-time veterinarians and two fish-health technicians, visiting farms five days a week. According to a CityU Today report^※, the team serves roughly 1,000 farms, and the cost of on-site visits is fully borne by the AFCD's Sustainable Fisheries Development Fund — so fish farmers pay nothing extra.

Documented results so far include: diagnosis of a range of bacterial diseases including pathogens with zoonotic potential such as Vibrio spp., Aeromonas spp. and Streptococcus spp., and the accumulation of more than 40 bacterial isolates from aquaculture systems across Hong Kong for AMR analysis.

The fish service also trains veterinarians: CityU BVM students can take fisheries placements, and the service runs workshops for the wider Hong Kong veterinary community, helping close a chronic shortage of aquatic veterinary expertise in the territory.

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# Food safety and quality research: a supply chain traced back from a Lei Garden dining table

Among OHRP's research portfolio sits a topic easily overlooked but directly tied to ordinary citizens' dining tables — Applied Food Safety and Quality Research. According to the OHRP research projects page^※, the project is led by Professor Pfeiffer with Dr. Ioannis Magouras, in collaboration with the well-known Hong Kong restaurant chain Lei Garden Restaurants, funded by the Faithful Servant Charitable Foundation Limited.

The work is concrete and clear: map the full value chain of the meat used by Lei Garden, identifying suppliers, producers, processors and buyers one by one; assess how each link's practices affect the quality and safety attributes of the meat; and on that basis judge whether a formal risk assessment is needed to refine Lei Garden's existing Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) system. According to the same page, the research deliberately cuts across animal science, food production, microbiology, technology, epidemiology, economics and the social sciences — taking "a plate of meat set on the table" and unpicking it backwards into a traceable, verifiable supply chain.

Put this project alongside the pig, chicken and fish wings and the logic is consistent: the ambulatory veterinary service guards the production end (on the farm), while the food-safety and quality research extends the checkpoint to the distribution and catering end (the supply chain and the kitchen) — only with both ends held can the "farm-to-table" public-health loop actually close. This also answers the "One Health" frame with which this article opened: disease control and food safety were never two separate matters.

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# Beyond local service, what international research and policy roles does OHRP play?

OHRP's policy-advisory role is not confined to Hong Kong. The main international projects:

One Health Poultry Hub: Led by the UK's Royal Veterinary College (RVC)^※, funded through UK Research and Innovation's (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and launched in January 2019, covering Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. According to a The Poultry Site report^※, the Hub received around £19.1 million in GCRF funding, bringing together experimental, clinical, veterinary and social-science teams across Asia, Australia, Europe and the UK. Professor Pfeiffer serves as the Hub's deputy director. The research core is the public-health risks — food poisoning, avian influenza, AMR — arising from surging poultry demand in developing countries, with particular attention to how intensive production amplifies infectious-disease risk and to identifying the "high-risk behaviours, processes and environments" in which that risk concentrates.

The EPINEST project: According to JCC news of 26 March 2024^※, CityU collaborated with the University of Oxford, RVC, Bangladesh's Chattogram Veterinary and Animal Sciences University, the University of Queensland, and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, among others, to develop, with GCRF funding through the One Health Poultry Hub, EPINEST (EPIdemic Network Simulation in poultry Transportation systems) — an agent-based simulation framework modelling the spatiotemporal spread of avian-influenza pathogens across real poultry production and transport networks. The design intent is to let policymakers "target interventions precisely and evaluate their impact", and the framework was deliberately built to be extensible to other livestock species and disease systems, not just poultry.

Cross-border African swine fever risk assessment (OIE/CityU): OHRP worked with the Southeast Asia sub-regional office of the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH, formerly OIE) to develop and publish a Manual on Cross-Border Risk Assessment for African Swine Fever in Southeast Asia^※, and in 2020–2021 converted the in-person training into a series of online seminars. OHRP also contributed to WOAH's latest guidelines on ASF vaccines^※.

Nanobubble antibiotic-reduction research: a three-year project funded with HK$15 million (launched March 2019) testing nanobubble technology — ozone injected into microbubbles to kill bacteria in water without harming the fish — in both marine and freshwater aquaculture systems, with partners in Thailand, Vietnam, China and Scotland.

GX Foundation humanitarian initiative memorandum (2026): According to a CityU press release of 26 June 2026^※, the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences signed a memorandum of understanding with the GX Foundation on 22 June 2026, signed by CityU's Acting President Professor Lee Chun-sing, JCC Dean Professor Vanessa Barrs and GX Foundation Chief Executive Professor Emily Chan Ying-yang. The collaboration focuses on One Health and humanitarian relief, giving BVM students field experience in vector-borne and zoonotic disease control, cataract surgery, disaster-resilience projects and youth development, across countries in West Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania and Central America along the "Belt and Road". According to the release, OHRP will "contribute to GX Foundation projects"; its existing mission of disease prevention and evidence-based policy is complementary to GX Foundation's humanitarian agenda — the first time OHRP's policy-advisory reach has explicitly extended into humanitarian-relief settings in developing regions, rather than remaining purely animal-disease surveillance.

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# What disease-modelling tools has OHRP built, and who uses them?

Policy advice often stalls at one point: mathematical disease models are a "black box" to non-specialist officials. OHRP's response has been to turn modelling itself into a clickable public tool with adjustable parameters. According to a CityU Scholars impact page^※, Professor Pfeiffer co-developed Epidemix — a free online infectious-disease modelling application that lets users of any background adjust parameters, assumptions and interventions and see how disease spread changes accordingly, turning "the model" from a specialist's preserve into a transparent tool for teaching and decision-making. According to a One Health Poultry Hub impact story^※, co-developers include Hub co-investigator Dr. Guillaume Fournié and Dr. Petra Muellner of EPI-interactive with her team.

Epidemix began with generic transmission models and has since gained disease-specific ones. The Hub impact story cited above records that when the app launched in 2017 it carried only a few generic models; an African swine fever (ASF)-specific model was added later, a COVID-19 model was folded in at the start of the 2020 pandemic, and an avian-influenza model based on Hub research followed in 2021. The same story says that since launch, Epidemix has been accessed by users in more than 140 countries/regions, with over 5,000 unique users logging in in 2021 alone — a considerable reach for a specialist tool maintained by a university centre. In December 2020, Professor Pfeiffer and Dr. Fournié ran a public webinar under the title "Epidemix V2: Taking Disease Models to the Web"^※, introducing the new version's features — including a model with ASF as a preset scenario for demonstrating the consequences of delayed detection and reporting, so that teaching and scenario drills no longer require locally installed specialist software. This "research → tool → training" path is of a piece with the ASF manual's shift from in-person training to a series of online seminars^※: one-off knowledge outputs are sedimented into repeatedly usable public capacity.

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# How does OHRP's role differ from the rest of the veterinary college?

The table below clarifies the functional boundaries between OHRP and JCC's other major veterinary units:

These four functions coexist within one university veterinary college, forming a continuous chain from individual-animal clinical care → population health management → regional public-health policy — the One Health framework made flesh at institutional level. Facility details of the first two (VMC, VDL) appear in veterinary-college-2.md.

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# Fact-checking notes for this article

The key figures in this article (the HK$35 million in funding; the names of the three project leads; 43 pig farms / 28 poultry farms / 945 marine and 332 freshwater fishery sites; the team of two part-time vets plus two technicians; more than 40 bacterial isolates; the 2019 baseline of 40 pig farms / 38 farmers / 14% local supply) are all traced to official CityU press releases or peer-reviewed journals. Director Pfeiffer's titles have been verified against his CityU Department of Infectious Diseases and Public Health profile page. Every figure carries its basis and source year (the 2019 funding announcement). The Chinese rendering of Professor Pfeiffer's name, "郑达峰", follows the name he commonly uses in Chinese publications and is subject to official documents. The "completed" status of the two 2019 two-year pig and poultry projects and the names of the follow-on projects were verified against the OHRP ambulatory veterinary services master page^※ as its current public state in July 2026. The signatories' titles and the date of the GX Foundation memorandum follow CityU's official press release. The funder of the Lei Garden supply-chain project, "Faithful Servant Charitable Foundation Limited", is rendered as translated from the official page.

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