How to teach a group of primary school children about a difficult topic like the human immune system? How about the modus operandi of antibiotics? Or resistant bacteria?

The answer is: make a comic strip! Preparing this program which was held in Vellary Thangal Primary School and Keeranallur High School in the first two weeks of February, I for the first time noticed the great usefulness of PowerPoint’s “insert a form”-button. Said shapes can be put together to make up almost everything – be it immune cells, bacteria or antibiotics.

The result was the story of an immune cell that is struggling to fight the hard cored TB germs and therefore looks for help. Help will come – in form of antibiotics which eagerly begin to kill the evil microorganisms but have one weakness: as soon as the bacteria get to know their strategy, they will prepare themselves and become resistant.

There were two objectives of this program: Educating the children about tuberculosis and ways to prevent it and creating awareness about the spread of resistances in bacteria which make antibiotic medication useless and are especially problematic in the treatment of TB. Such resistances are often enhanced by the prescription of antibiotics for viral diseases.

Since strengthening one’s immune system always includes a healthy nutrition, the program also contained a revision of the nutrition pyramid, a topic they had learned about before, and the making of fruit salad.

When I came back after a week and asked the children about the comic I had showed them, the story they told me was the following:  “Immune cells love to eat bacteria, but TB germs are hard to digest, so they need the help of antibiotics.”

“And will antibiotics help also against viruses?”

“NO!”

I suppose these are answers I can be happy with.