We’ve been working with Bristol-based filmmaker Joseph Turp, who has made this beautiful video about the project, based on a beautiful poem by the excellent Michael Rosen. It’s designed as a training tool for healthcare workers, and has been developed in dialogue with nurses at Southampton General and at Southmead Hospital, Bristol. Using some of the techniques of the Mapping Microbes experiment, it tells the story of the spread of simulated pathogens, making visible the effects of hand hygiene and the value of healthcare staff at the front line of infection prevention. Do let us know what you think!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7xnaXSJab0&w=560&h=315]

As part of the Eco Bathrooms project, Charlotte Veal and Paul Hurley of the Mapping Microbes team have been working with artists Caleb Parkin and Megan Clark-Bagnall to create an interactive Bathroom Jungle-themed game, communicating some of their work around AMR in the domestic sphere. Aimed at Key Stage two children, the game premiered at Winchester Science Centre during the half term holidays, and engaged hundreds of families in activities and conversations around AMR. Children were taken on a journey through a series of fun challenges – Biofilm Connect Four, Loo Seat Sponge Throw, and Drug Resistance Duck Race – to communicate some of the mechanisms of AMR and to talk to families about their domestic cleaning practices. The team were interested in what alternative metaphors of AMR could be – ecosystems rather than battlefields, colonisation and survival rather than zombie attacks! This is part of a longer NAMRIP-funded research project that Veal and Hurley have been involved in ‘Fighting Superbugs on the Home Front: Becoming an Ecological-Citizen in Your Bathroom’, along with Emma Roe, Bill Keevil, Ian Williams, and with Owain Jones from Bath Spa University, exploring how citizens can connect domestic practices to the global threat of AMR.