This round we have awarded Healthy Lungs for Life Grants to 5 amazing projects – which are all focused around World Lung Day on the 25 September.
Dr Marco Clari from the University of Torino Italy has created a game to demonstrate and visualize the impact of vaccines. The game focuses specifically on the pneumococcus bacteria.
Dr Clari and their team have developed the educational game because of the misinformation and conspiracy theories that circulate about vaccines. Turning important issues into games can improve knowledge, change attitudes and fight misinformation. The team will host an evening where the public will be invited to play the game and learn more about the importance of vaccines and provide feedback on the game to improve it for future use.
Grace Parraga, and her team from The University of Western Ontario, want to raise awareness about the effects of smoking, vaping and COVID-19 on lung function and exercise. They will setup a booth in a central area of the university campus to attract as many students as possible. Here they will distribute information pamphlets, and an exercise limitation simulation, which gives participants an idea of what it is like to experience shortness of breath as with severe lung disease. These activities are planned to encourage students to quit smoking or to not start smoking.
Qamar Iqbal and his team at FFWO Pakistan will hold a series of activities starting on World Lung Day. They will design awareness materials that highlight the benefits of quitting smoking, the hazards of smoking and of passive smoking. These will be delivered to government hospital doctors to raise awareness with visiting patients who smoke.
On 1 October with the help of school administration and city traffic police, Qamar will organise a workshop on the importance of physical activities for ten classes of school students, that will enable these students to become healthy lungs for life advocates. He will also arrange a public meeting with the city transport workers to raise awareness about pollution
On 6-7 October the team will arrange a public gathering with the city transport workers and those who work on traffic busy road sides as traffic is a major contributor to air pollution in Pakistan to raise awareness of air pollution.
Tara Ballav Adhikari from Healthy Lungs Nepal will organise 2 week-long events that will raise
awareness of the hazards of e-cigarettes among Nepali Youth. They will use radio, social media, and school platforms. They will also organise an online essay competition among school-going adolescents about the hazards of the use of e-cigarettes.
To promote physical activity for healthy lungs they will organise a social media campaign, #WalkandTalk, where youths and adolescents will walk and talk about physical activity for good health and tag the videos with the hashtag.
All the sessions and events will be uploaded to YouTube and shared among social media platforms and networks.
Sergiy Rudenko from the National Institute of Phthisiology and Pulmonology of Ukraine will inform parents and patients with respiratory diseases (including chronic lung diseases) about the harmfulness and effects of smoking on the body, the impact on the development and course of lung diseases.
Information will be provided during the scheduled visits of children to the doctor in the Department of Pediatric Pulmonology and Allergology and they hope to reach 400 children with respiratory diseases and their parents over 2 weeks. Brief information will be provided verbally and an information letter will be provided for review. Information posters about the dangers of smoking on a regular basis will be placed in hospital wards. They will also teach up to 30 doctors about performing spirometry testing to understand lung function.
