Team:Dundee Schools
Project Description
Every month running from February 2016 our team attended monthly meetings to discuss our project and brainstorm ideas, allowing us to talk about what we would like to work on throughout the summer. During these meetings we all came up with various ideas and eventually managed to narrow it down to the idea of targeting bacterial infections which cause diarrhoeal infections in the developing world.
Two of the main bacterial infections caught in developing countries are shigellosis and cholera. Shigellosis is an infection caused by the bacteria called Shigella. The bacteria can be passed from infected person’s faeces; this can be through contaminated water and food. When a person catches shigellosis they develop severe diarrhoea which can often contain blood. 165 million cases of Shigellosis are recorded each year, 163 million of them being in developing countries when hygiene levels are poor. This causes over 1 million deaths annually in third world countries.
Cholera is a bacterial infection which causes diarrhoea, this can then lead to dehydration and often death. It can be caught by the transmission of the bacteria Vibrio cholera from an infected person’s faeces, this can occur when sanitation is very low so water and food can also become contaminated. An approximation of 3-5 million cases of Cholera are apparent each year, with over 100 000 deaths.
So we have decided to target Shigella and Vibrio cholera by using RNA interference. This will hopefully reduce the number of cases of people presenting with these bacterial infections.
Since beginning our summer project in June, the dry team have contacted various people and charities to get a range of opinions on our method of killing these bacterial infections. This helped lead our team in which direction is most effective for us to progress in, whilst the wet team have begun in the labs.
We hope to design cheap and accessible bacteria that can be easily used and distributed to developing countries to kill bacterial infections, specifically cholera and shigellosis.
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