This blog is where we share stories, announcements, and insights from around the iGEM community.
All tagged Health
Antibiotic resistance - the most impactful silent pandemic of the century. It's astonishing to see how iGEM teams worked on different aspects of the problem in 2021, with some teams focused on detection of antibiotic resistance, while other teams developed new emerging technologies to kill the bacteria.
World TB Day is March 24, which marks the day in 1882 when Dr. Robert Koch announced his discovery of the bacterium that causes TB – Mycobacterium tuberculosis – opening the way towards diagnosing and curing this disease. Despite being preventable and treatable, TB is still one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases, second only to COVID-19 in 2020. This year the theme of World TB Day is “Invest to End TB. Save Lives”, reflecting the urgency to invest resources to end the global TB epidemic by 2030.
Breast Cancer Awareness month is honored every October in countries around the world to increase awareness, early detection, treatment, and palliative care. Last year, 2.3 million women were diagnosed with breast cancer and 685,000 women died from this disease.
September is World Alzheimer’s Month, a time to raise awareness and challenge the stigma and misinformation that surrounds Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
World Hepatitis Day serves to raise awareness of the global burden of viral hepatitis, an infectious disease causing inflammation of the liver, leading to cirrhosis, liver cancer and death, that affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. In honor of World Hepatitis Day, we’d like to highlight some of the iGEM teams that have focused on hepatitis through the years.
It’s been over a year since the World Health Organization officially declared that COVID-19 was a global pandemic. At that time, we were uncertain whether iGEM 2020 would even take place. Thanks to the dedication of the iGEM community and the resilience of the teams, iGEM 2020 became one of the most amazing seasons, bringing with it new approaches and technologies for making iGEM accessible to everyone, everywhere.
