Presented by Vanessa Nichols

One Health Lesson‘s mission is to educate every child on the planet about One Health: the connection between animals, humans, and the environment. With the onset of COVID-19, lessons were developed to break down complicated topics such as species, mutations, diseases caused by germs that spread between humans and other animals called zoonotic diseases, and vaccines into fun and engaging activities. 

One of the classic One Health Lessons activities is on how mutations work!

Say this sentence five times fast:

Did you hear any changes or mutations? Did you make these changes on purpose? No! Just like when a virus mutates, it’s not on purpose. Sometimes there is a mistake in our DNA, like a missed or switched letter, that causes a change. And mutations are simply change. They can be good or bad. You didn’t mean to say a black blug, but it happened anyway.  

Viruses can also jump between different hosts. Have you heard of the flu virus? This virus in particular is really good at mutating. When one virus finds another virus inside the host or body, they can combine to make a whole new virus. 

This body could be a pig and that virus causes the swine flu, or the body of another animal that can accidently mutate the virus and make another version of the virus.

Let’s try another activity to demonstrate this! 

We have our red sentence or red virus that goes like this: 

Now, we have our blue sentence/virus:

What happens if we mix the red and blue sentences to create a purple sentence? 

Did combining the two sentences strengthen it? Weaken it? Or just make it plain weird?

This is the same when it comes to a virus that mutates. A mutation can strengthen it, weaken it or have no effect on it! 

If you want to see more One Health lessons in action, check out their YouTube channel where you can watch a full, pre-recorded lesson for every age group. Find out more about One Health Lessons in our previous story!