The school community contests organised within the AlergiaPT project, promoted by the Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto (ISPUP), counted with the participation of 253 primary, middle, and secondary school students from four districts of Portugal.
The contests, which started in March and ended on April 13 of this year, challenged Portuguese students to submit works on topics related to allergies, using their schools’ social networks.
To include different school years, three contest modalities were created: “The Allergy Detective”, for primary school students, “Social Allergy”, for middle school students, and “TikTok and AlergiaPT”, specifically for secondary school students. The most creative works, as well as those with the highest number of likes on the AlergiaPT social networks, were awarded along with the schools of the participants with the most voted projects.
André Moreira, ISPUP researcher and coordinator of the AlergiaPT project, leaves a word of appreciation to all the contest participants: “We thank all the students, teachers, technicians and schools that participated in these contests. We received very creative works and in quite varied formats”.
“We believe that this initiative really helped raise awareness about allergies among students. If we want to help children and teenagers to face allergic diseases in a positive way, we should bet on projects of this nature”, he says.
The winners of each contest have been announced.
In the contest “The Allergy Detective” (1st cycle), the winners were the Escola Básica de Paredes; the student Maria Viralhada, of the Escola Básica de Paredes; and the 2nd grade classes of the Colégio Valsassina, in Lisbon.
In turn, in the competition “Social Allergy” (2nd and 3rd cycles of schooling), the winners were the Escola Básica e Secundária Dr. Machado de Matos, in Felgueiras, the students Ana Catarina Mendes Tomé and Leonor Leite Ribeiro, from the same school; and the student Maria Sousa, from Escolaglobal, in Santa Maria da Feira.
In the “TikTok and AlergiaPT” competition (secondary school), the winner was class 11ºF of the Escola Secundária de Arganil, in the district of Coimbra.
The awarding of the prizes – FNAC gift vouchers worth 100 euros and a 65-inch led 4k television for the schools – will take place on May 4, 2022.
AlergiaPT is a project promoted by ISPUP with the aim of inspiring Portuguese people with allergies to have a more positive attitude towards life, through a social media-based campaign.
Officially launched on May 4, 2021, World Asthma Day, the project was one of the winners of the This is Public Health (TIPH) Global Grant Program, a funding program created by the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health which rewards initiatives related to the dissemination and promotion of the importance of public health.
Recently, AlergiaPT was mentioned in an article published in the prestigious scientific journal Allergy, entitled Managing the allergy and asthma epidemic in 2020s-Lessons from the Finnish experience, as an example of a Portuguese media campaign directed towards people with allergies.
Image: Unsplash/Element5 Digital
