‘One Health’ Research and Policy Centre — CityU’s Veterinary Outreach as Public Health Ambition

This article belongs to Module 11 (‘Medicine/Hospitals’) of the Unofficial History Archive of City University of Hong Kong. The public face of CityU’s veterinary enterprise is the largest animal medical centre in Southeast Asia, located in Sham Shui Po (see veterinary-college-2.md), and the hard-won programme accreditation (see veterinary-college.md). This instalment focuses on a less visible part that pushes veterinary science beyond the clinic walls — the CityU Centre for Applied One Health Research and Policy Advice (OHRP), and the ambulatory veterinary services it operates on pig farms, chicken farms and fish rafts.

Information current as of June 2026; facts carrying years, figures or institutional names are sourced in situ. Living scholars mentioned in this article appear in the context of routine academic biographies, official visits and professional achievements, and are named on the record.

Bottom line: The CityU Centre for Applied One Health Research and Policy Advice (OHRP) was established in October 2016 under the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences. In 2019, with HK$35 million^※ in funding from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, it launched Hong Kong’s first ambulatory veterinary service that makes house calls on farms.

At a conventional clinic, vets wait for patients to come to them. The OHRP vets flip the model: they drive out to pig farms in Yuen Long, chicken farms in Sheung Shui and fish rafts in Sai Kung, taking stethoscopes to the field. Their patients are not cats and dogs but the several dozen local livestock farmers and fish farmers still working in Hong Kong. The logic behind it goes beyond curing sickness: one sick pig or one cage of sick chickens could be the starting point of the next zoonotic disease outbreak, and is also a source of risk for food safety and antimicrobial resistance on the dining table. This article begins with the institutional set-up of the centre and traces how it has extended the reach of veterinary medicine into public health.

# What is the OHRP? — a ‘policy-oriented’ veterinary research centre

According to the centre’s official website^※, the CityU Centre for Applied One Health Research and Policy Advice (OHRP) was set up in October 2016 under the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC). It sits alongside the more familiar Veterinary Medical Centre (VMC) and Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (VDL) as one of three distinct operations: the VMC handles clinical consultations, the VDL handles laboratory testing, and the OHRP handles research and policy — turning findings from the farm into scientific evidence capable of influencing government decisions.

The centre’s self-described mission is phrased in a single, rather long English sentence. According to the OHRP website^※, the centre aims to “generate scientific knowledge that will lead to the development of evidence-led policies at local, national, regional and international levels for the prevention and control of infectious animal diseases affecting human health and animal production, welfare and health.” Within this winding mission statement lies the difference between the OHRP and an ordinary veterinary institution. A typical vet clinic asks: what do I do about this sick animal? The OHRP asks: why do these diseases occur, and how can policies prevent them from spreading? The three keywords in the centre’s name — Applied, Research, Policy Advice — mark its niche precisely: it does not do pure theory, but connects field research directly to the policy table. The centre also states its ambition to become “a recognised global centre of excellence in One Health research and policy advice.”

# Who is at the helm? — Pfeiffer, who treats ‘connecting science to policy’ as method

The director of the OHRP is Professor Dirk Pfeiffer, CityU’s Chow Tak Fung Chair Professor of One Health. According to a Times Higher Education report^※, Pfeiffer joined CityU in 2016 to take up this chair professorship while retaining about 20 per cent of his post at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in the UK; he is an internationally known scholar in veterinary epidemiology, specialising in the use of statistical and modelling methods to study the spread and control of animal diseases.

Pfeiffer repeatedly emphasises one thing: the often neglected gap between science and policy. According to the Times Higher Education report^※, he points out that a key aspect of the research work is “how to connect the science with policy such that it has an impact on policy” — that is precisely the origin of the ‘Policy Advice’ in the OHRP name. Producing elegant research is not enough; the research must change what regulators do before it can count as having landed.

His assessment of disease risk is equally blunt. The same report quotes him on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), calling it “an extremely worrying global epidemic,” a problem bigger than Covid-19, only slower-moving and more insidious. Placing the phrase “a problem bigger than Covid” in the mouth of a centre director who studies medication on farms neatly explains why the OHRP keeps an eye on every antibiotic injection in pigsties and chicken sheds — antibiotics misused on farms eventually make their way back to humans.

According to the same report, another key member of the centre is Professor Sophie St-Hilaire, an aquatic animal health expert who leads the fish health projects described later. By bringing terrestrial livestock and aquatic species under one roof, the OHRP covers the full spectrum of research on “terrestrial and aquatic production animals.”

# What is the ambulatory veterinary service? — Hong Kong’s first team to bring vets onto the farm

The most concrete, and most livelihood-facing, part of the OHRP is the Ambulatory Veterinary Services. According to the OHRP ambulatory veterinary services page^※, with support from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD), the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences has launched Hong Kong’s first ambulatory veterinary service for fish, pig and chicken farmers. The term “ambulatory” here means precisely that the vet does not sit in a clinic but goes out to the farm at the farmer’s request — bringing diagnosis, sampling and disease-prevention guidance directly to the farm site.

The overall goal of the service is summed up in a single official sentence: according to the OHRP ambulatory services page^※, it is “to work with the farmers to find solutions for preventing disease and to improve the sustainability of their farms.” The phrasing “to work with the farmers” matters — this is not top-down inspection and punishment, but standing alongside the farmers, helping them prevent disease and keep their farms going.

Why is a “house call” model a first for Hong Kong? The local livestock and aquaculture industry is small, geographically scattered, and has long lacked vets specifically serving farms. According to a BMC Veterinary Research study on pig farmers^※, many pig farmers interviewed complained that government vets in the past were slow to respond and had limited specialist capability; when disease struck a farm, help was often nowhere to be found. One interviewed pig farmer put it bluntly: “The problem is that in Hong Kong now there is no one that can teach us how to do so.^※” The OHRP’s ambulatory service plugs precisely this gap of “no one making the house call.”

# Where did the HK$35 million come from, and where does it go? — the ledger of three projects

The ambulatory service is not a pro bono effort; behind it stands a clear allocation of public funds. According to a CityU press release of January 2019^※, the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences received a total of HK$35 million from the AFCD in January 2019 to launch three two-year research projects, targeting the three major farming sectors of pigs, chickens and fish respectively. These three projects form the financial skeleton of the ambulatory veterinary services.

A note on the figures: the amounts for the three projects (HK$15m + HK$15m + HK$5m = HK$35m), the principal investigators and the intended beneficiary numbers all come from CityU’s official January 2019 press release and the JCC project page, reflecting the situation at project launch in 2019. The two land-based projects (pigs and poultry) were supported by the Sustainable Agricultural Development Fund, while the fish project was supported by the Sustainable Fisheries Development Fund — both are public funds managed by the AFCD to help upgrade local farming and fisheries.

Professor Pfeiffer’s stated goal for the projects is quoted as one sentence: according to the CityU press release^※, “Our goals are to improve farm productivity, animal welfare and food safety, and to prevent the emergence of zoonotic diseases.” That single sentence lists four things side by side — productivity, animal welfare, food safety, zoonotic disease prevention — which neatly illustrates why this service is not just about “helping farmers treat sick animals,” but straddles agriculture, public health and food safety simultaneously.

What the projects provide is a dedicated veterinary service: according to the CityU press release, this includes clinical support tailored to the needs of each farm, as well as disease-prevention assistance targeting pathogens, parasites and harmful algal blooms. In other words, the vet’s farm visit is not just about jabs and prescriptions; it also involves helping the farmer find weaknesses across the whole chain of husbandry management, biosecurity and disease surveillance.

# The chicken farm story: PHAP and PHPM, from 2019 to 2024

Among the three sectors, the poultry project has the most complete public record and best illustrates the complete OHRP loop of ‘farm visit + research + policy’. According to the poultry case study in CABI One Health Cases (2024)^※, the poultry project was actually delivered in two phases:

• Poultry Health Assurance Project (PHAP), running from 2019 to 2022;
• Poultry Health and Production Management Project (PHPM), running from 2022 to 2024.

According to the same case study, both phases were funded by the Sustainable Agricultural Development Fund and established collaborations with the AFCD, the Chicken Breeders Association of Hong Kong, and the CityU VDL, providing veterinary services to around 29 chicken farms in Hong Kong. This collaboration chain is telling: a government department (AFCD) providing the money and the policy framework, a trade association (the Chicken Breeders Association) providing trust and access, a university diagnostic lab (VDL) providing testing capability, and the OHRP providing the vets and the research — four parties working together to deliver the service to local chicken farms.

The service was about more than diagnosis and treatment. According to the poultry One Health case study^※ and related OHRP introductions, the project also launched free newsletters and continuing education seminars (referred to as a “Poultry News–Technology Promotion Information Plan”), delivering the latest husbandry techniques and disease-prevention knowledge to farmers and tackling the old problem of farm staff having “nowhere to upskill.” One of the core objectives of the project was to help chicken and pig farmers reduce antibiotic use by understanding antimicrobial resistance (AMR) — a point that directly echoes Pfeiffer’s judgement that AMR is “a bigger problem than Covid-19.”

Tease the chicken farm project apart and it turns out to be doing four things at once: on-site clinical care, lab testing (VDL), farmer training (education), and reducing medication (a policy goal). Any one of these on its own is unremarkable, but weaving them together into a publicly funded service system covering nearly thirty chicken farms across Hong Kong is a first. The fact that CityU produced an academic case study from this poultry One Health practice (CABI One Health Cases, 2024) is itself a step towards “turning field experience into transmissible knowledge.”

# The pig farm story: 43 pig farmers, and a study that recorded their hesitation

If the chicken project shows the OHRP’s smooth side, the pig project has left behind a rare kind of academic paper — one that honestly records when farmers were not buying in. This also allows the current account to go beyond official publicity and see the real friction when a service lands on the ground.

First, the baseline of Hong Kong’s pig farming industry. According to a study published by BMC Veterinary Research in February 2023^※, in 2019 there were 40 active pig farms in Hong Kong, run by 38 pig farmers; median farm stock was about 2,800 pigs (range 950–7,000), producing around 100,000 pigs a year for slaughter. These local pigs account for only about 14% of Hong Kong’s pork supply, with the other 86% imported — a small industry that nonetheless carries the dual role of supplying local fresh meat and acting as a biosecurity outpost.

The value of this study lies in its dedicated investigation of pig farmers’ perceptions of CityU’s pig health and production management service. The conclusions are not uniformly rosy: according to the study^※, pig farmers’ attitudes towards this new, free vet service were a mixture of cautious optimism and suspicion — they welcomed someone coming to the farm, but also doubted whether CityU vets truly understood local farming practices, and worried about language barriers (many frontline vets are not native Cantonese speakers). The situation is best captured by one interviewed farmer’s remark: “The problem is that in Hong Kong now there is no one that can teach us how to do so.^※” — they were hungry for someone to teach them how to improve breeding and husbandry, yet felt even CityU might struggle to connect with their practical reality.

The direct manifestation of this friction was the participation rate. According to the study, out of 38 pig farmers, only 9 ultimately took part in CityU’s service, a participation rate of about 24%. The study grouped the difficulties pig farmers face into three categories: first, regulatory constraints (farm infrastructure restricted by outdated rules, making upgrades difficult); second, inadequate veterinary support (slow government response, limited specialist capability); third, threats to the survival of the industry (poor public image, labour shortages, absence of R&D, competition from mainland China). These three overlapping pressures meant that a “farm-visit vet team,” however needed, could not easily overturn years of helplessness in a single stroke.

# Fish rafts and fish ponds: the aquatic health puzzle facing nearly a thousand farms

Among the three sectors, the one with the largest number of covered operators is, in fact, the sea. According to the CityU press release^※, the fish health project is led by Professor Sophie St-Hilaire, funded by a HK$5 million grant from the Sustainable Fisheries Development Fund, and serves approximately 945 marine fish culture operators and 332 pond fish culture operators — vastly more than the pig and chicken sectors, albeit each operation is much smaller.

Disease prevention and control in aquaculture present different challenges from those on land. According to the CityU press release, the fish project’s disease-prevention assistance specifically covers pathogens, parasites and harmful algal blooms. Harmful algal blooms — commonly known as “red tides” — can kill an entire fish raft’s stock in a very short time and are historically one of the disasters most feared by Hong Kong’s marine fish farmers. Including red tide monitoring within a vet service shows that the OHRP’s understanding of “fish disease” extends to the culture environment itself — a concrete example of how One Health links animal health with environmental health.

According to the OHRP website^※, the centre is also conducting research on nanobubble technology in the aquaculture direction, aimed at reducing antibiotic use in fish farming — a goal entirely consistent with the land-based drive to “reduce medication in livestock and poultry,” both of which bring AMR control efforts onto the farm. With the fish project led by an aquatic animal health expert and aimed squarely at red tides and drug reduction, the OHRP’s ambulatory service truly covers both terrestrial and aquatic production, rather than only the livestock and poultry beyond companion animals.

# Why does this count as ‘public health’ and not just ‘treating sick animals’? — the One Health framework

When taken together, the services for pig farms, chicken farms and fish rafts reveal that the OHRP’s real ambition is not animals, but people. And that brings us back to the “One Health” in its name.

One Health is a concept that treats human health, animal health and environmental health as a single, interconnected whole: the three are mutually linked, and a problem in any one will spread to the other two. According to the Times Higher Education report^※, Pfeiffer, speaking about this concept, said: “The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that animal health and welfare is inextricably linked to human health.” One sentence explains the OHRP’s reason for being — preventing disease on the farm is preventing disease in people.

For Hong Kong, this concept carries an especially concrete weight. The city lies on a major migratory bird route and borders mainland China’s agricultural regions; historically it has several times served as an early-warning zone for zoonotic diseases (such as H5N1 and H7N9 avian influenza). A vet network capable of doing disease surveillance, rapid sampling and on-site diagnosis on local farms serves as an “outpost” in the early stage of an epidemic. The OHRP feeds farm data collected by the ambulatory service into zoonotic disease and antimicrobial resistance research, and then pushes the research findings towards policy — this chain of farm → data → research → policy is what distinguishes it from an ordinary veterinary institution.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the most typical subject along this chain. To prevent disease and boost production, farms routinely add antibiotics to feed; resistant bacteria then breed inside the animals and travel back to humans through the food chain and the environment, weakening the efficacy of antibiotics used for people. When the OHRP helps pig and chicken farmers “reduce medication use by understanding AMR,” on the surface it looks like agricultural extension work; in substance it is guarding an upstream gate for the medication safety of every person in Hong Kong. Pfeiffer’s characterisation of AMR as “a bigger problem than Covid-19” makes perfect sense in this light — it moves slowly and stealthily, yet transmits silently between animals and people.

# From the chicken shed to the dining table: why food safety and quality fall under a vet’s remit

Within the OHRP’s research portfolio is a line often overlooked by outsiders, yet one that directly concerns the dining table of ordinary citizens — Applied Food Safety and Quality Research. According to the OHRP website^※, this is an independent research strand standing alongside disease prevention and control; and according to the poultry One Health case study (2024)^※, the poultry project itself lists “food safety and chicken meat quality” among its objectives — one of the ultimate goals of serving the farm is to make the piece of chicken on the dinner plate safer.

The logic of putting food safety under a vet service is not convoluted: if a chicken on a farm carries bacteria, has excessive drug residues, or is contaminated during transport and slaughter, the person who eats it bears the risk in the end. By helping chicken farmers use drugs properly and control diseases at the farm end, the OHRP’s ambulatory vets intercept the hazard at the very upstream of the food chain — a far more proactive approach than waiting until the chicken reaches the wet market before doing spot checks. The pathogen identification and drug sensitivity testing capability of the CityU VDL provides the laboratory backbone for this line; for details of the VDL’s testing, see veterinary-college-2.md.

This also explains why the OHRP bundles “reducing on-farm antibiotic use” and “food safety” within the same service. Antibiotic misuse fuels both resistant bacteria and drug residues, both of which are food-safety problems. For a city that depends on supply chains for 86% of its pork, a large proportion of its chicken and much of its seafood, securing the farm-end safety of that local 14% of fresh pork, as well as the local chicken and fish, serves as an extra layer of protection for citizens and keeps a controllable model within the entire food chain.

# From Hong Kong to the region: the One Health Poultry Hub and epidemic modelling

The OHRP’s vision does not stop at local farms in Hong Kong. As a centre that sets its sights on regional and international policy, it has extended its reach into larger-scale epidemic network research.

The most representative of these efforts is the One Health Poultry Hub. According to JCC news^※, this is an international project funded by the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), in which Professor Pfeiffer serves as Deputy Director. The project brings together laboratory scientists, clinicians, veterinarians and social scientists to use a One Health approach to investigate a sharp question: how and why does the intensification of poultry production raise the risk of infectious diseases, and from that to identify high-risk behaviours, processes and environments, and then test new control measures.

This hub has also produced concrete tools. According to the same news item, the team developed a computer model called EPINEST (EPIdemic Network Simulation in poultry Transportation systems) — an agent-based simulation framework for modelling how pathogens spread within real poultry production and distribution networks. Turning the transport chain that moves live chickens from farm to market into a computable network, then “running a virus through it,” is precisely Pfeiffer’s signature method of using modelling to connect science with policy.

According to the OHRP website^※, the centre’s research portfolio also includes cross-border risk assessment of African swine fever in Southeast Asia, nanobubble drug reduction technology for aquaculture, and the aforementioned food safety and quality research on chicken. All these topics share a common backdrop: diseases and food risks never stop at the edge of a single farm or a single city. What the OHRP aims to do is connect the first-hand observations from Hong Kong’s farms into the regional and even global disease-control line.

# Division of labour with sister articles, and boundary notes

To avoid duplication with other articles in this module, the division of labour is; this article covers the set-up of the OHRP, the ambulatory veterinary service and One Health research;

• For the founding of the JCC, the Cornell collaboration, the BVM curriculum and international accreditation, see veterinary-college.md;
• For the facilities, specialisms and scale of the Veterinary Medical Centre (VMC) and Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (VDL), see veterinary-college-2.md;
• For the history of the VMC’s expansion through the acquisition of the Peace Avenue Veterinary Clinic, see veterinary-college-3.md;
• For the note that CityU does not have a medical school for humans, see biomedical-and-health-sciences.md.

Boundary notes (recorded as-is; not supplemented by conjecture):

• Information on the most recent operating status of the ambulatory services (whether projects were renewed after 2024, and renewed amounts) is limited in the open record; this article takes the two phases of the poultry scheme (PHAP 2019–2022, PHPM 2022–2024) and the three two-year projects from 2019 as verifiable anchors. Any subsequent renewals await official announcements.
• The pig farm participation rate (9/38) and pig farmers’ views come from the BMC Veterinary Research academic study (2023); these are the researchers’ survey findings from a specific point in time, not an official account. This archive attributes them as found and does not treat individual interviewees’ comments as the settled view of the entire industry.
• The named chair “Chow Tak Fung” is a donor-endowed title; this article records it as it appears in official English and media usage and does not attempt to reverse-engineer the donor’s Chinese name.

# Summary

Pulling the facts together, the OHRP’s position within CityU’s veterinary enterprise can be summarised this way:

1. Institutional niche — The OHRP was established in October 2016 under the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences, standing alongside the VMC (clinical) and VDL (diagnostics). It specialises in “research & policy advice,” with a mission to generate evidence and drive evidence-based policies for animal disease prevention and control.
2. On-the-ground instrument — The ambulatory veterinary service is Hong Kong’s first to make house calls on pig farms, chicken farms and fish rafts. Launched with HK$35 million from the AFCD in 2019 (HK$15m for pigs, HK$15m for chickens, HK$5m for fish), it covers 43 pig farms, 28 chicken farms and nearly a thousand fish farming operations.
3. Public health substance — On the surface, the service helps farmers treat disease and boost production; in substance, it turns farms into sentinel outposts for zoonotic diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), embodying the One Health idea that links human, animal and environmental health.
4. Friction on the ground — An independent academic study of the pig project records that only about a quarter of pig farmers participated and that widespread doubts existed, signalling the trust and cultural barriers that a publicly funded service inevitably faces during implementation. This archive presents both the official and academic perspectives side by side; it does not adjudicate between them.

In one line: CityU does not have a medical school for humans, but through a centre that sends vets into the farm fields, it has extended “veterinary science” into “public health science.”

---