WATANI International
5 April 2009
On the global scale Egypt is third in the number of cases of bird flu since its incidence in 2003 but, at nine cases discovered during the first quarter of 2009, it is globally the highest in the number of bird flu cases this year.
Countless commercials, newspaper articles and TV shows have been produced over the last six years to raise awareness of the threat posed by bird flu, but all with very limited success. It became obvious then that, if awareness campaigns are ever to achieve their goals, they should take an entirely new turn.
The Ministry of Education and the Egyptian Red Crescent have now teamed up with UNICEF in a campaign to fight bird flu, making school children partners in the process of battling the disease. Means of interactive learning, including games and activities, are used in programmes that extend over several weeks to educate children about bird flu and qualify them to play a vital role in their community to spread awareness.
Family and friends
The Entertaining Educational Activity Bag Programme targets 3.7 million children in 13 governorates in Upper Egypt and the Delta, aged from 6 to 12. The bag contains a collection of colouring material and drawings in addition to games and activities provide children with all they need to know about the virus, the illness, and the methods of protection against the disease. A facilitator assists the children in using the material and makes sure they understand and enjoy the games and activities.
Once they grasp the concept, the children are asked to visit, accompanied by their supervisors, families in their villages or districts, to inform them of what they have learnt. The children are encouraged to go to the homes of relatives, neighbours and friends with their new-found information on bird flu, to raise awareness.
Snakes and ladders
The popular board game of Snakes and Ladders is one of the tools used to teach the children. Once they do some hygienic activity such as washing their hands with soap and water, wearing gloves and masks while cleaning the bird cages, boiling eggs and cooking chicken well, they score by climbing up the ladders. Negative practices, however, such as breeding birds inside the house, handling dead birds, or using the kitchen utensils used to clean the birds for other purposes in the kitchen, make the child slither down with the snakes and lose score.
The Sudoku is also used as an informative technique. On a big chart divided into several squares children are asked to place sticker cards that carry hygienic messages in the right place. The facilitator discusses with the children the information they read, focusing on the four major messages: wash your hands with soap and water, keep children away from birds, place the birds far from the living quarters, and report any infected case by calling 105.
Workshops are also conducted to encourage children to use coloured clay to depict the places where birds live, which should be separate from those of the family.
The Abdel-Sabour show
Students in the preparatory school stage are encouraged to act the play called Abdel-Sabour and Bird Flu. The story is about Abdel-Sabour who loves his pet rooster which wakes him up every morning. When some birds in his village are infected with bird flu, Abdel-Sabour becomes worried and his parents start to apply all the health precautions to protect their son and the rooster from this virus.
A sketch played by the chickens Kuku and Wawa helps the children know the symptoms of the virus in infected birds, including ruffled feathers, green diarrhea, pinkish discharge from the nostrils, feebleness, inability to walk, fly or stand, purple-blue coloured wattles and comb, breathing trouble, and swelling of eyelids. In domesticated poultry, bird flu symptoms also include loss of appetite, soft-shelled eggs, and a drop in egg production.
In the case of humans, children learn that bird flu symptoms are similar to those of ordinary influenza, and usually include cough, sore throat, fever, muscle ache and fatigue.
The five adventurers
The bag also includes a CD of a cartoon film telling the story of a village where some birds get infected with bird flu and, despite the precautions taken by the villagers to protect their birds, the virus spreads wildly and no one can figure out why. The ‘five adventurers’ decide to pay a visit to the village and work to discover the secret. They find out that a wicked man called Fay who dislikes the villagers has got infected birds and thrown them into the canal to pollute its water. The villagers are told; they take action and the village is accordingly saved.
Statistics indicate that 64 per cent of the victims of bird flu are children. Now the children themselves are made to become pivotal in fighting the virus.