Team:Shanghai HS United/Public Engagement
We conducted publicity for our team, and then carried out scientific popularization and dissemination of the knowledge on African swine fever to the community, and finally told them how to avoid African swine fever virus in their daily life.
One of the representative events was the lecture at Anzhai Residence Community. We held a lecture about the ASFV in a community center for many senior citizens. In the lecture, we informed them what ASAF is and what impact it has on people’s livelihood. Most were not attracted at first, because, as they claimed, they knew little about the ASFV.However, most of them felt concerned after we said there would be a high potential of the skyrocket price of pork. In short, citizens will rise more awareness of the presence of ASFV if it relates to expenses of living.
Meanwhile, we also held a fundraising event on the grand stage of a local restaurant. We believe that this should be a milestone event for us. In the first place, we actively sought for sponsors for our events, luckily after making hundreds of cold-calls and on-site cold visits, we managed to persuade the manager of a local seafood restaurant (Mr. Su’s Fish Restaurant) to hold the fundraising event, where we invited our PI, professor Liang Zhang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University， and our instructor,Dr. Shiyuan Li to present the big picture of our vision about developing a rapid detection method of ASFV. In addition, our team members held charity sales and talent show to raise fund. We finally got over 2000 RMB in this event, which will be contributed to further research on ASFV research.
Last but not least, we utilized our WeChat official account to proliferate the knowledge on ASFV and our project and encourage all of our team members, friends and relatives to share them with the public.
