Team:CSMU Taiwan/Sustainable

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Sustainable

SDGs, which stands for Sustainable Development Goals, is a broad program proposed by the United Nations. They listed 17 different goals, invited everyone in this world to make a contribution and hoped this agenda can be fully accomplished by 2030.¹

CSMU_Taiwan, this year, hasn't just worked on providing a novel detection method for oral cancer. Furthermore, to make people move one step closer to good health, we care for all the health issues in addition to oral cancer.

Prevention is better than cure when it comes to good health. To achieve this goal, raising public awareness of health issues is of great importance. By educating the public about correct knowledge concerning health issues, we believe people around the world will value their health condition more.

The achievement would be limited if we make contributions alone. Only by building a partnership with one another and working together can we make greater impact on health issues.

Thus, we decided to target these three SDGs to make the world better.

All About Viruses

With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging, we believed that it's our duty to educate the public about the virus diseases and make people more aware of viruses to stay healthy in their daily lives. CCU_Taiwan, this year, focused on dengue fever caused by the dengue virus. With the same idea in mind, we decided to work in close collaboration with CCU_Taiwan on transmitting basic knowledge of viruses to the public.

In this collaboration, we targeted children as our stakeholders. As children have difficulty concentrating on reading articles or listening to lectures for a long time, we tried to find the best material for children to acquire knowledge about viruses. Thus, we decided to create a storybook with lots of illustrations to intrigue children to read it. Also, given that children had limited knowledge to the science, we chose to share the basic concept of health such as the importance of wearing masks and keeping social distance when in public. Furthermore, instead of asking children to wear masks and taking body temperature directly, we tried to incorporate these basic health knowledge into the story, making children better understand the importance of these important concepts. We hoped our storybook could effectively educate children what to do to fight against virus diseases, especially in the era of COVID-19 pandemic.

All About Viruses storybook (English version)

All About Viruses storybook (Chinese version)

Achievement

Good Health and Well-Being:

We stressed the importance of the basic concept of health and briefly introduced the basic knowledge concerning viruses.

Quality Education:

By creating a storybook with lots of illustrations, we believed it was a good material for children to be interested in this storybook. Also, children may easily acquire the knowledge with the story close to our daily lives.

Partnership:

We worked in collaboration with CCU_Taiwan. CCU_Taiwan wrote the story while we designed illustrations for the story to co-create the storybook "All about viruses".

i've gotta phd

Social media has deeply impacted our daily lives these days. Thus, it may be a great platform for us to shorten the distance with Internet users and educate them about health issues. This year, we and NCKU_Tainan together set up a Facebook page, I've gotta PhD, to allow every iGEM team to create health-related work. All pieces of work were regularly posted on this platform and Internet users would be able to acquire knowledge from them. With the power of education and partnership, we believed these issues would be discovered by more Internet users and people would put more emphasis on health issues.

In order to diversify and concretize the broad idea of good health, we and NCKU_Tainan came up with seven topics all related to health issues and formulated concrete guidelines to help other iGEM teams to participate. Also, for the purpose of attracting more Internet users to follow I've gotta PhD, we and NCKU_Tainan encouraged teams to create their work with any format, including articles, videos, posters, podcasts, art, and so on. By now, we've received 13 pieces of fantastic work from 10 different iGEM teams all over the world and posted them on the Facebook page. Each team targeted different topics and provided sufficient information to instill the concept of health into Internet users and better provide viewers different perspectives on health issues.

All the health-related work from the participating iGEM teams

Achievement

Good Health and Well-Being:

We gathered contributions to different health issues including science communication on oral cancer, basic health care in endometriosis and zoonosis, mental health in chronic inflammatory diseases, breaking discrimination and racism against COVID-19 and Obstetric Violence, and so on.

Quality Education:

By creating delicate works targeting different health issues and topics as well as regularly posting on the I've gotta PhD platform, Internet users may acquire plentiful knowledge concerning health issues and have other viewpoints from the work.

Partnership:

We've collectively made contributions to health issues in I've gotta PhD in collaboration with NCKU_Tainan, BNU_China, CCU_Taiwan, Montpellier, NYMU_Taipei, Patras, Rochester, UCopenhagen, UPCH_Peru, ZJU-China, and Thessaly.

panel discussion

In addition to educating children and Internet users about health issues, iGEMers are also our important stakeholders. To strike up conversations with iGEM teams in Taiwan, we and NCKU_Tainan co-host a panel discussion. In this event, all the participating teams had to hand in their description and three problems of their project in advance so that every team may read the contents before the panel discussion started. In order for each team to get feedback as much as possible, we and NCKU_Tainan put teams into different rooms and had them present to each other. One team would be the presenter and the other team would be giving feedback, and then they would switch their roles. After both teams have presented, teams would rotate to another room and present it to a new team. At the end of the presentations, everyone was gathered together and each team would provide a brief summary of what they have learned during their presentations and from the feedback.

During the panel discussion, we focused on the culture of betel nuts in Taiwan. Blue-collar workers are in a working environment where everyone chews betel nuts to refresh themselves. Though understanding the risk of suffering from oral lesion by chewing betel nuts, they still stick to their own habit due to workplace stress. We invited all the participating teams to think about how to urge these workers not to chew betel nuts. During the process of the discussion, we came up with a potential solution where we could try to develop a novel chewing gum with a refreshing effect and a chewing sensation similar to the actual betel nuts. Also, some teams also thought we could establish a trend by sharing this betel-nut-flavored chewing gum and further influenced more workers to quit chewing betel nuts that might result in oral cancer. On the other hand, we also gave some feedback on other health issues including the aging promotion of dengue fever raised by CCU_Taiwan, the relation between cigarettes and glaucoma raised by NCKU_Tainan, and so forth. Thanks to the panel discussion, we received some boundary-breaking ideas and boosted our creative thinking. Also, we got the chance to know more issues of SDGs and the concerns raised by other iGEM teams as well as expressed our opinions towards the issues.

Achievement

Good Health and Well-Being:

We discussed different issues of SDGs related to the projects we were working on, including the culture of betel nuts in Taiwan, aging promotion of dengue fever, the relation between cigarettes and glaucoma, and so on.

Quality Education:

By sharing the description and raising problems with one another, iGEMers could learn more about different health issues and understand current obstacles needed to be tackled. Also, iGEMers could give constructive or creative opinions to other participants and had a deeper conversation. iGEMers not only educated others but also were educated by others.

Partnership:

We held the panel discussion in collaboration with NCKU_Tainan, NTHU_Taiwan, NCTU_Formosa and CCU_Taiwan.

future

We believe that our dedication to SDGs isn't enough and needs expanding and gathering more people in different realms. In the future, we plan to consult with more stakeholders including experts excelling in public health, researchers working on diseases, the officials devoted to laws and regulations. Furthermore, we also need to build stronger connections with the public so as to make people move one step closer to good health. Health education of the public requires every potential stakeholder to unite, discuss and collaborate together. As iGEMers, we have the responsibility to make the world better and even better.

reference

United Nations. (n.d.). Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development | Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Retrieved October 27, 2020, from https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda