Overview

To improve our HP serving for the theme: reducing antibiotics abuse, we also did some interviews. Questionnaires only provided a preliminary understanding of people’s thought, while we can learn more from face-to-face interviews. We proposed that the abuse of antibiotics should be avoided at the same time in the interview. Face-to-face communication also attracted more people to participate in.

Coinciding with the college enrollment day, we made a nice brochure, for the publicity of synthetic biology, iGEM competitions, our project and other things related to ethics, social justice and legal issues, which interested students very much.

Besides, we went to undeveloped areas to distribute leaflets containing some common but necessary information about antibiotics. Considering the low education level of villagers, we used simple words to explain the dangers of antibiotics abuse, outlined the right usage of antibiotics. Newsletter is an information exchange platform, and we developed 46 teams joining it. There are many iGEMers finding the information they need through newsletter.

Interview

Our interview was made among all the different age groups and people with different education backgrounds, including highly educated Phd and professors and the old with low education from less developed regions. We found that how much people know about antibiotics is influenced by many issues like age, region and education background. For example, some elder men knew little about antibiotics, some of them even haven’t heard about antibiotics, while those who received high education can illustrate what antibiotic is using terminology. That means we need to promote education for the public especially in those less developed area. Also, we found that people paid less attention to the antibiotics used for nonhuman species. In result, antibiotics abuse was common in such field without strict regulation and supervision, which illustrated that there should be more attention paid to the antibiotic used in the food industry. We found that there still were some ways to buy antibiotics without prescription. Modern people are living at a very fast pace and some interviewees said that there wasn’t enough time to go to the hospital for professional instructions on drug using. Actually, the antibiotic is not a panacea which should not be always used. Through the interview with doctors, we learnt much professional advice, understood the protocol of antibiotic use, and finally saw the danger of the antibiotic misuse.

We added doctor's advice and science knowledge into our video. During class break, we played our video making more people know about antibiotics. We truly hope that students who have seen the video will understand the importance of rational drug use and could join us to promote standard antibiotic use.

Brochure

At the start of this term, as there are so many freshmen, we designed and printed our brochure beforehand which included the introduction of synthetic biology, iGEM competition and the discussion of related social issues. The abuse of antibiotics has a tight relation to ethics, safety, society stability, social justice, sustainability, law and regulation. Discussing with the undergraduate, especially those freshmen whose major connected to biological medical science could let them have a plain understanding of synbiology. In this way, we could get more and more partners with great idea and amazing ability to join in the family of synbiology.

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According to the results of our questionnaire, we designed a leaflet with vivid but plain contents. Entering the poor region, we informed those villager of antibiotics and the right way to use antibiotics. Especially communicating with the elderly with poor education, we are patient to explain, which aims to strengthen the public consciousness of using antibiotics correctly.

Newsletter

Newsletter is the most special part in our human practice and it is the third year that we published newsletter for the competition. We made effort to construct an international iGEM platform serving for the communication and collaboration between iGEMers.