Deborah Thomson: Bringing One Health to the Next Generation around the Globe
May 2021
Deborah Thomson, DVM, has been leading lessons with CRS since 2018. She is also the founder of One Health Lessons, which aims to teach children and adults around the world about the interconnection between our health and the health of the environment, animals and plants. This spring, Dr. Thomson was selected as an Inspiration Honoree as part of the 200,000 Students Inspired Celebration in May 2021.
What inspired you to become a veterinarian and to start One Health Lessons?
I’m a very curious person, I’ve always been that student saying “I have a question! Over here!” I think ultimately my parents’ encouragement of asking questions, especially hard questions, led me to explore a lot of different professions. So when I was younger I was considering being an architect, a musician, a statistician, a teacher, a physician, so many things. And I was fortunate to ask if I could shadow or interview people in these professions. When I was able to shadow veterinarians, that’s when I was hooked. I remember I was in a marine biology class, a field class on this gorgeous beach, white sand, clear water. And there was a moment when I thought, I’d rather be in a veterinary hospital. If that wasn’t an “Aha” moment I don’t know what would be.
The reason why I wanted to be a veterinarian ultimately is because I saw that one action that I could take had an influence not only on my patient’s health, but on the people who were relying on that patient. It could be for food, for milk, for eggs, and it could be for companionship, and that certainly plays a role in mental health. So with my one action, I could influence a lot of things in the environment.
Click to hear about her inspiration in her own words
How did you become involved in education outreach with CRS?
When I first learned about One Health, I was already in my mid twenties and I wished I had learned about it twenty years before. I thought “What can I do to help students and their families and their communities understand the importance of how our health plays into the health of the environment, animals, and plants?” I realized you could do that through education. After my 10-12 hour shifts in the animal hospitals, I used to go home and create lessons for children about One Health. On my days off from the hospital, I went into the classrooms and taught. One Health Lessons is a combination of my two passions: OneHealth and teaching.
BASIS was one of the wonderful venues where I was able to reach students. If it wasn’t for BASIS, One Health Lessons where it stands right now could not exist. I am thoroughly grateful to have made that connection with Tyler and everyone at the CRS team.
What continues to bring you a sense of wonder in your work? How do you incorporate it into your work?
What inspires me each day with One Health Lessons is the profound effect that One Health Lessons have had on the world. The seven different age appropriate lessons about COVID-19 that are freely available on Onehealthlessons.com are now being translated into 82 different languages. It is not easy to translate a lesson. So it’s quite an investment. But to see others want to volunteer and contribute to this global movement keeps me going. These are volunteers that I’ve never met, never heard the name of, coming from countries that I’m learning now. It is absolutely incredible, you put something out in the world, and it catches. People want to bring these materials into their own communities, their own first languages. That pay it forward movement that’s happening right now around the world is incredible. The way people now know how to teach these lessons is because of One Health Lessons and BASIS.
From my experience teaching, I’ve realized that if you can get a child to laugh, they become involved in the lesson. And if you can get them involved it means that they’ve increased their memory of the lesson, not just how they felt during the lesson, but of the material. I remember this wonderful thank you note from a 9 year-old named Riley who wrote that he was very impressed and had a lot of fun in the lesson talking about mutations, which happen with bird flu, with pig flu, when one virus combines with another and creates a whole new virus. The activity for the lesson is similar to Mad Libs, we make the craziest sentences possible. Riley loved that activity so much he told his parents about it. That thank you note showed not only that he remembered the material and had fun during the class, but also that he educated his family. When you have an affect on a child, you have an affect on a family. And when you have an effect on the way a family thinks, you can change communities, and ultimately change society.
Describe a discovery you’ve made.
In 2020, when I create lessons, I want the kids to learn but (also) to know that they’re learning. I want the kids to focus on the activity at hand. An activity in the COVID-19 lessons focuses on point mutations, and it gets the kids to do tongue twisters. That is why you can’t just have Google translations. You have to have people involved, the best tongue twisters. The best way to educate is to get somebody to do an activity, get them to laugh, to play, and in doing so they learn at the same time.
Describe a goal you have.
The goal for me and One Health Lessons is the same: to inspire every child and adult to value the interconnection between our health and the health between the environment, animals, and plants. In addition, it’s to inspire more collaborative action between people of various strengths and abilities so that we can finally solve complicated problems together.
I hear you have a book coming out?
Yes, it’s The Art of Science Communication: Sharing Science with Students, the Public, and Policymakers. The point of this book is to improve the communication skills of scientists and engineers around the world so that they can deliver their important message to the right people at the right time in the right way. It is coming out on Amazon by mid-May of 2021.