Reading time: about 20 minutes, plus multimedia contents.
Executive summary: the first deployment round has been completed. The leadership accounts for international coordination across the EU COST action are active. The core communication, collaboration and governance systems are operational. nextcloud.health.int.eu.org is ready for shared documentation, data, research materials and joint production. talking.health.int.eu.org is ready for meetings, training and real time coordination. All members can sign in immediately. No invitation is required. Accounts for all remaining members will be created in the coming days only to accelerate access, not to restrict or filter participation. The main hub at beacon.health.int.eu.org will continue to host updates until its full replacement in the coming weeks by an open source Ghost publication platform, where every member and allied institution will be able to publish, share results, contribute reports and document progress openly.
Note: if these updates are not of interest, the subscription can be cancelled through the link at the end of the message. Be encouraged to consult our video materials at https://www.youtube.com/@onehealthedtech. Thank you for all sharing and inviting others to the action, as well as for having read about us this far. A bettered version of this text will be uploaded, fully referenced and updated with news on the website, by this Friday 21st of November. By then, further news will also be shared on the action own official publication, on its website development and the materials shared on the infrastructure by then. Thanks again for your continued support. Please, drop me a line if myself can ever be of help to you. My apologies for the slow deployment.
The biosphere is entering a period of accelerated destabilisation. Every scientific assessment confirms that ecological decline is driven by human decisions, not natural cycles. Forests are being removed faster than they regenerate. Soil fertility is collapsing under chemical overload, erosion and repeated extraction disregarding the hidden obvious costs, by many of us still allowing the worse, as if others' own death and carnage, weakening, despair, had to be the byproduct and side juggle of anyone. Never ending, one providing half the will and structures needed to enforce law and stop the ongoing butcheries, all pandemonium. Rivers and aquifers carry industrial toxins, microplastics and pathogens that impair agriculture, neurological development and immune function. Oceans warm, acidify and lose oxygen, altering entire food webs. Climatic extremes intensify. Heat waves kill outright and silently damage cardiovascular and renal systems. Floods erase communities. Droughts limit food production and force displacement. These are not distant risks. They shape the daily environments of children throughout the EU COST region and beyond.
Human biology is sensitive to these pressures. Prenatal exposure to pollutants alters brain development. Childhood exposure to particulate matter reduces lung capacity and increases lifetime mortality. Endocrine disruptors interfere with growth and metabolism. Chronic malnutrition limits cognitive ability and increases susceptibility to disease. Environmental stress activates chronic inflammatory states that degrade health over decades. These outcomes are recorded in epidemiological datasets. They are predictable, measurable and reversible only if the conditions that produce them are corrected. Health depends on environmental integrity. Environmental integrity depends on governance. Governance depends on education and participation. These links define the scope of One Health.
The material conditions of communities across the COST region reflect these failures. Water systems have been left vulnerable to contamination through neglected infrastructure and insufficient oversight. Agricultural regions struggle with soil degradation and nutrient imbalance. Urban districts accumulate heat and air pollution that harm infants and the elderly. Schools operate without adequate ventilation, thermal control or humidity regulation. Hospitals absorb preventable disease burdens caused by environmental exposure. Public health agencies monitor crises rather than prevent them. Data gaps obscure early warnings. Institutional inertia delays response. These failures compound the burden on families, educators, clinicians, administrators and researchers. They are structural and correctable through scientific coordination.
The action is designed to build the systems that should have existed decades ago. Monitoring platforms will be deployed across schools, municipalities and key institutions to track air quality, water safety, soil health, structural integrity, disease patterns and climatic indicators. Open data formats will allow every participating country to integrate findings. Local researchers, educators and environmental specialists will interpret and validate results. Children will learn directly from truthful measurements of their environments. Teachers will have access to tools that support scientific literacy. Communities will gain the means to recognise risks and demand intervention. Governments will receive actionable data instead of fragmented reports. This operational coherence is essential for protection.
Children are the primary focus because they absorb the greatest harm and possess the greatest potential for recovery if conditions improve. Their physiology is vulnerable to neurotoxicants, food insecurity, heat exposure and chronic stress. Their education is disrupted by instability. Their future health is shaped by exposures during growth. Every scientific field confirms this. When children grow in safe and informed environments their cognitive capacity, emotional stability and social competence increase. When conditions are degraded their potential collapses. The same holds for communities and nations.
The action positions children not as passive beneficiaries but as active contributors. Educational systems will integrate open tools that allow learners to document environmental indicators, interpret scientific results and build competency through participation in collective work. These skills form a foundation for advanced learning in health, engineering, ecology, computing and civic responsibility. Schools become centres of observation, analysis and cooperation. Teachers become facilitators of scientific practice. Students build portfolios that demonstrate real contributions. Local communities gain access to trained youth who understand their environment and can act with the planning and precision long required. Now, on us, to act it properly. Be as strong as humanly possible, delivering on all that was required from us in this action and the rest of our work, our lives, each of our endeavours.
This infrastructure requires constant improvement. Knowledge based systems will be installed within the upcoming week to support natural language processing, pedagogic applications, content generation and research queries. All APIs and integrations required for mapping, documentation, repositories and roadmap coordination will be prepared. Members will be able to propose tools, upload content, connect datasets and develop new applications through the shared platforms. Each contribution will be traceable, auditable and expandable through open source protocols. This is a cumulative system. It grows as members use it.
The crisis affecting children does not permit delay. Death, disease, stunting, displacement and institutional neglect impose immediate and long term harm. These harms are the direct consequence of inaction, also of our action failing miserably if, by not doing what it took, fragmentation and misaligned governance. They are reversible only if the systems that produce them are replaced with systems guided by scientific truth, public duty, full transparency and open participation. The action is structured to achieve this replacement. It requires every member to participate, invite others, share the mission widely and bring expertise from across sectors.
This is a vital undertaking, essential among the most urgent for humankind at this stage and state of collective disrepair and disrespect, despite the needs of all and, specially, the most in need and endangered by this collapse by design, by leashing out the worse in each one of who allows and forces against them and all other. The work must expand early, reach all COST countries rapidly and establish a durable foundation for the years ahead. Every institution, government, university, organization and local community is invited to participate. Please share this update, invite colleagues, mobilize networks and contribute proposals for missions and roadmap tasks. The next outputs will guide the remaining steps.
The systems required to stabilize the biosphere, protect children and restore the foundations of human societies must be built with exactitude because the conditions they are meant to correct were created through profound moral collapse, not through natural limits. On a planet where resources, knowledge and tools are abundant enough to safeguard every life, the persistence of harm reflects the normalization of exploitation, the endurance of practices rooted in enslavement and the tolerance of behaviours that treat human beings as expendable. The killing of principled individuals, the systematic obstruction of those attempting to protect others and the deprivation imposed on children who inherit nothing but violence, hunger and contaminated environments arise from institutions that have abandoned foresight, decency and responsibility.
Precision is required because the failures we confront are deliberate. They arise from actors who profit from chaos, from systems built to obscure responsibility, from governance structures shaped by hostility rather than care, from educational environments stripped of values, truth and science, and from the silencing of those who attempt correction. Children are denied the conditions essential to growth because adults permit brutality to pass for authority. Communities are weakened because societies tolerate the absence of the most basic ethical principles. Foresight has been replaced by short term gain. Opportunity has been replaced by exclusion. Life has been treated as disposable.
Restoring stability requires systems that leave no margin for these failures. Environmental monitoring must be precise so that no community remains unprotected. Health surveillance must be continuous so that no child is left to deteriorate unnoticed. Education must be grounded in evidence, responsibility and cooperation so that future generations are capable of sustaining what is built. Technology must be aligned with protection, not exploitation. Governance must operate transparently so that corruption and abuse cannot survive.
This work must advance on Earth, where the most basic duties remain unmet, as well as in the emerging space of human expansion, including future lunar outposts that will rely entirely on integrity, coordination and scientific discipline. The lessons learned from these new environments reinforce what should already have been universal: human survival depends on systems built with accuracy, honesty and shared responsibility. The action is directed toward rebuilding these foundations, at the EU level, the entire EU COST area, and third allied countries, hoping to reach soon to planetary scale. Our, your work, is urgently needed, and will be rewarded to the best of the entire network and action capabilities, growing stronger. Financed, or at least shared wide openly, disseminated and kudoed in detail, depth and breath to the extent required, willed and needed. Environmental science, public health, pedagogy, engineering, medicine, democratic social governance and technological development are integrated into one operational field because fragmentation has failed and will fail again. Each component secures the others. None can exist alone, unprotected, in any system set to achieve well-being to all. Health, prosperity, the task at hand, all ready and willing to contribute in.
This is the level of precision required to protect every life and to reverse the damage caused by decades of neglect, cruelty and institutional betrayal, tragically here down to Earth, to reconnect a World that was never this close to an understanding. None of us forces a believe system on an ancient golden axe, nor such age to hold as better but the future, for our children. All, on proper life support systems, where life if void of reason unless all works, as here. Fellow us, Earthlings, soon abroad. Moon bases, not for the detriment of who. All of us, for the shared joy to be alive and achieving. Education needs to uphold our legal systems. End the criminality inside, rotting it all, and every loophole in the wording, implementation and biocultural control systems.
Prison, shame, brutal force, precision on the ends that are urgently required and still lacking on mostly punitive and unjust mileaus, silos of hatred against each other and marginalized, target populations, because evil, criminals, accomplices, the indifferent ones, adapt when institutions fail to intervene. On Earth the destructive behaviours inherited from older eras have been permitted to persist behind uniforms, bureaucracies, cultural norms and political structures that excuse harm rather than correct it. These behaviours degrade environmental systems, destabilize communities and strip children of the conditions necessary for healthy development. The resulting damage accumulates across generations. Contaminated water reshapes bodies. Chronic stress rewires cognition. Hunger alters growth. Violence fractures identity. Neglect corrodes entire futures. These outcomes are measurable and preventable, yet they are allowed to continue because societies tolerate corrupted systems that normalize indifference.
A functioning society requires more than resources or technology. It requires a moral and educational framework capable of detecting harm early, addressing it immediately and preventing its repetition. Environmental stability requires governance grounded in evidence, not rhetoric. Public health requires institutions that enforce protections impartially. Childhood development requires environments that are clean, safe and free from predation. None of this can be improvised or left to chance. The precision demanded in space habitats is equally necessary on Earth because life depends on narrow margins. Air quality, water purity, food safety, structural integrity and biological resilience operate within defined thresholds. When these thresholds are breached, harm becomes inevitable.
The same scientific discipline required to sustain life in closed systems must now be applied to the open systems of Earth, where collapse is slower but far more widespread. Ecological disruption has pushed entire regions beyond their adaptive capacity. Health inequities have entrenched cycles of suffering. Education has been hollowed out by misinformation, coercion and the absence of stable environments. Governance has been undermined by actors who treat power as immunity. These failures converge into a single trajectory: the erosion of human potential at scale.
Correction requires systems that cannot be overridden by neglect or exploitation. Open data infrastructures must allow continuous environmental and epidemiological monitoring. Educational systems must be rebuilt around scientific literacy, civic responsibility and cooperative behaviour. Legal structures must enforce protections without bias. Technologies must interoperate to allow rapid detection, coordinated response and transparent evaluation. Public institutions must regain legitimacy by acting with impartiality, accountability and consistency.
This action is constructed to deliver such systems. Its approach combines open science, open technology, coordinated governance and a commitment to the children whose futures rely on the decisions made now. It mobilises educators, researchers, engineers, clinicians and community members across the COST region. Its work strengthens the societal functions that protect life. It all depends on broad participation, scientific rigor and sustained cooperation. Every contribution reinforces the foundation required for collective recovery.
Environmental integrity requires engineering solutions grounded in open standards. Air quality sensors must be calibrated, deployed and networked across regions so that particulate concentrations, chemical signatures and temperature profiles are measured continuously. Water systems require pathogen detection, chemical assays, conductivity measurements, turbidity tracking and structural monitoring of pipes, reservoirs and treatment stations. Soil systems require nutrient mapping, contaminant quantification, moisture analysis and erosion modelling. Built environments require assessments of ventilation, humidity, thermal loads, noise exposure and structural strain. Every dataset must flow into common formats to ensure interoperability.
Health stability requires surveillance systems capable of detecting outbreaks, injury patterns and chronic exposure effects before they escalate. Paediatric indicators are central, including growth metrics, respiratory function, metabolic markers, mental health signals and acute symptom clusters. Health services require transparent reporting systems that connect clinical observations to environmental data. Epidemiological modelling requires access to real time inputs to issue early warnings. Research institutions require open datasets to study trends and propose corrective interventions. These systems must be embedded in schools, clinics and local agencies so that protection begins where risk emerges.
Education must anchor these systems. Children require curricula that explain environmental processes, health principles, civic responsibility, technological tools and cooperative practice. They require learning environments that model the structures they are meant to inherit. Teachers require training, protection and resources. Schools must become active contributors to monitoring networks, producing validated observations that feed regional systems. Pedagogic platforms will be deployed through open source tools such as Moodle, upgraded and customised for multi linguistic use, accessibility for students with special needs and integration with scientific datasets. Children will learn scientific method through direct participation in environmental and health surveillance. These competencies will grow into research, engineering and community leadership roles.
Technological capacity must be built with open source ecosystems. The action invests its resources in open tools because they enable auditing, improvement and long term sustainability. Chat based platforms, mapping systems, knowledge engines, databases, modelling frameworks, documentation tools, educational software and communication systems must all be open. Proprietary systems cannot serve public health because they conceal the mechanisms by which decisions are made. Open tools allow COST countries, partner institutions and student contributors to inspect code, improve functionality, correct errors, connect to new datasets and adapt systems to local needs. This is essential for scaling.
Governance must be democratic in structure and scientific in operation. Decision making must be transparent, documented and tied to evidence. Working groups must remain open for participation from all members. National and local structures must develop in parallel so that responsibilities are distributed rather than centralised. Institutions must be accountable to the data they produce. Communities must hold decision makers to the standards set by the action. Only through distributed responsibility can corruption, delay and institutional paralysis be prevented.
The economic and institutional waste produced by fragmented data, incompatible systems and closed architectures has damaged public health, environmental quality and social cohesion for decades. This action corrects that failure by establishing stacking standards, interoperable systems, shared repositories and a culture of cumulative improvement. Proposals for coordinated missions will be funded through COST mechanisms in the first half of next year. Additional funding will be pursued through allies, governments, foundations, scientific networks and private actors committed to public interest. Sustainability requires expanding the resource base and diversifying contributors.
Children stand at the centre of this work. Their health, safety and cognitive development determine the future of every institution. Technologies deployed in schools are instruments of protection and learning. Curricula developed through this action are instruments of clarity. Monitoring systems are instruments of safety. Governance structures are instruments of stability. When these systems function together, children gain the conditions required for full development. Their families gain security. Their institutions gain legitimacy. Their societies gain resilience.
All members are asked to participate actively. Please develop proposals, organise local groups, share resources, invite colleagues, involve students and expand the network. The success of this work depends on early mobilisation, broad coordination and shared responsibility. Myself is the communications, dissemination and exploitation officer, our COST action coordinator, and will focus on the human factor consortium creation on ending torture and killings in the name of health, medicine, the common good and sense, from my individual member capacity, continuing the ongoing work done until now on mental health and shackling.
My own work barely started, on shackling in Indonesia, must be situated within this very same scientific, ethical and operational logic that drives the action. This is not an isolated practice targeting a flawed bunch as if all genetic in nature, as the current main canon keeps on repeating itself, nor a local only sociocultural phenomenon. It reflects structural failures in governance, public health, education, social protection and mental health systems Worldwide, and deeper, more harshly entrenched, both human and civilization flaws lodged in pain against target populations set to be at pain and blame, shame, guilt, punished and dispossessed of every right, property and opportunity for a legal fair trail. It emerges when families are abandoned, when services are absent or inaccessible, when stigma replaces care, when violence is tolerated and when institutions withdraw from their responsibilities. Our research needs to be documenting these dynamics with precision, without the blinders of any tradition and emic so-called explanation -both from science and medical fields, and the communities themselves. The pending literature reviews are essential for establishing a comprehensive evidence base on the mechanisms that sustain pasung, the harms it produces and the pathways to effective intervention.
The work myself is undertaking in Indonesia, the first action third country, is in need to provide a multidimensional understanding of confinement practices, as well as other forms of deceitful, punitive, coercive control and destruction of fellow human beings. It connects anthropological analysis with clinical realities, public health indicators and governance failures. Enslavement, sexual and otherwise. Meat to be set aside, destroyed. Illnesses of despair. The ill willed and feeble minded as well, since we are dealing with atrocities to set sooner than later to the trash bin of, from all of us, medical history -since that is the main defamatory excuse to deflect any responsibility, the pretext, excuse, frame, alibi, for the torture and killings in this one health particular context. Humans deprived of all rights, as if reason lacking. It is they all, those dehumanized as if barely brutes, the perpetrators and our entire societies, in need of much better. Criminals in between the victims, all a disastrous mix. These reviews will synthesize epidemiological data on psychiatric morbidity, environmental stressors, poverty cycles, family burden, health system gaps, human rights violations and community responses, as well as the ways new technologies, implementation, accessibility infrastructure, are to be put forward. The work merges with other ongoing actions at EU COST level and other allies, also examining how institutional weakness reinforce reliance on informal or coercive mechanisms of criminal control, in societies as Indonesia and our European Union, where the slightest forms of abuse are already criminalized. Torture, deaths, to be prevented, still normalized and that degree common, in both sets of lands and elsewhere. This body of work is required to design interventions that are scientifically grounded and socially viable. It will keep informing policy recommendations, service delivery models, preventive strategies and educational tools. Our plan is to resume this research once the first and second deployment rounds are stabilised aligns with the action’s operational logic, in a couple of weeks time, after my own doctoral work defense.
The infrastructure now being finalized is designed precisely to free your time and that of our allies, work efficiently and effectively, democratically, and to distribute responsibility across a flattened network without the ad hoc hierarchies forced by the EU COST structure on us once. Soon, the expert system, the knowledge base, the governance tools, the collaborative platforms and the communication channels will all be fully functional. By then, the collective work needs to be already advancing without depending on any single individual, as it has always been the case, despite this one major bottleneck we faced, now to be cleared with this big earning. The new network infrastructure allows us to return to the literature reviews, syntheses and comparative analyses, roadmaps, open source developments and deployments in any and all centers wishing, that only a stronger, growing network could ever produce.
The expert system to be will continue this work in a most impactful fashion. It will allow systematic extraction of data from documents, classification of literature, thematic coding, synthesis across disciplines, generation of annotated bibliographies and identification of missing evidence. The shared repositories will allow other members to contribute sources, comment on drafts, add regional data and integrate findings into the broader One Health framework. This ensures that the research on pasung becomes collaborative, cumulative and actionable across multiple countries.
The ongoing work analyses, all protocols, methods, plans, software code, raw and processed data to best inter-operational standards, results, course-ware, feedback will feed directly into the action's objectives, as soon as we set this work in motion properly. Our action needs to be informing governments at large, as much as training programmes for teachers, clinicians, community workers, other organizations and the main multinational bodies -minor and mayor- at work in these topics. They will guide policy briefings for governments and international organisations. They will expand understanding of how severe social and institutional breakdown manifests in everyday life. They will contribute to the scientific tools the action produces for preventing harm, strengthening systems and protecting vulnerable populations.
Once these first two rounds of deployment are complete, our work resumes not as an isolated research task but as a central component of our collective roadmap. It documents the human consequences of institutional collapse and offers the evidence required to build systems that prevent such harm. It strengthens the shared mission. It advances the scientific basis for intervention. It ensures that the action delivers on its commitments to protect children, support communities and rebuild capacity where it has been lost. Our return to this research is essential, and the infrastructure being deployed now is meant to secure the continuity, depth and collaborative strength that work requires
The work now requires alignment across all sectors, institutions and communities. States and societies exist to prevent harm and to secure the conditions that allow people to develop fully. When children live with preventable contamination, hunger, violence, educational failure and institutional neglect, legitimacy collapses. Every preventable injury is a measurable governance failure. Every unaddressed exposure, every unmonitored hazard, every ignored warning reflects systemic delinquency. No country can claim stability while its youngest members grow inside environments that degrade their health, cognition and safety.
The hidden costs of institutional inaction are vast. Early death, chronic illness, impaired neurodevelopment, reduced working capacity, long term disability, unaddressed trauma, weakened immune systems, increased susceptibility to disease, reduced educational attainment and diminished social cohesion accumulate across generations. Families absorb losses that should have been prevented. Health systems strain under burdens that should have been intercepted upstream. Economies lose productivity, innovation, stability and human capital. Communities lose trust. Societies lose their most valuable asset: the children who would have contributed to collective wellbeing.
Rebuilding requires strict, continuous enforcement of environmental, health and child protection laws. Monitoring systems must trigger immediate action when thresholds are crossed. Institutions must respond at the first sign of danger. No violation can be dismissed. No exposure can be ignored. No child’s safety can depend on discretionary judgement by actors who previously failed to act. The scientific and technological tools already exist to detect risks early, prevent damage and protect populations. They must be deployed everywhere.
Education must anchor the reconstruction. Children must learn how ecosystems function, how disease spreads, how institutions work, how evidence is evaluated, how cooperation supports stability and how responsibility protects communities. Adults must relearn the fundamentals lost through decades of misinformation and neglect. Schools must become centres of truth and practice. Universities must become engines of research, engineering, environmental management and public health. Training programmes must produce professionals capable of building, maintaining and improving the systems used to safeguard populations.
Leadership must come from people with the competence, clarity and integrity needed to ensure that protection is continuous. Expertise must be drawn from science, engineering, healthcare, education, environmental fields, social work, law and community practice. People who have experienced the consequences of institutional collapse are essential to designing systems that prevent recurrence. Their insight corrects blind spots and strengthens decision making.
The action must grow rapidly. Every COST country requires national and local working groups. Every working group requires active members. Every commission requires proposals. Every proposal requires scientific grounding, clear objectives and shared responsibility. Funding from COST will support coordinated missions beginning next year. Additional resources will be secured through partnerships with governments, academic institutions, global health networks, environmental consortia, philanthropic organizations and public interest actors. The long term goal is a sustainable ecosystem of open science, open technology and open governance capable of supporting entire populations.
The children who inherit the Anthropocene require systems that protect them, educate them and allow them to contribute. Their lives depend on air that nourishes rather than poisons, water that strengthens rather than sickens, food that supports growth, schools that protect rather than endanger and institutions that act rather than hide. These conditions must be built with precision and urgency. They determine whether societies stabilise or fracture.
All members and allies are asked to engage directly. Contribute proposals, join working groups, coordinate at national and local levels, disseminate knowledge, invite colleagues, students, institutions, governments and organizations. I am kindly asking for you to share this message across your networks, in deepest gratitude for this and all future contributions to this important work. This will allow for the network to keep on strengthening, the work to be knowing, and embrace a widening participation that is now sorely lacking and urgently required for essential working.
The action is built to transform the present and protect the future. Its success depends on collective effort. Every member counts. Every contribution strengthens the whole.
Please, join us in.
