Anti-Microbial Competition Winners Announced

Microbial disease – it’s not something we hear of every day if you’re a lay person, but it is a very real health issue that can affect us all. So the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO held an anti-microbial competition in two categories last November to get the participants to help educate the community on what it is. Today, they awarded the winners. Here’s is the list.

Dr. Tamarie Rocke, International, PAHO Consultant

“It was for World Anti-microbial Week, which is the use of medicines that we use to treat infection but the overuse of these medicines cause resistance in bacteria. It means that they’re more difficult to treat, they cause more severe infection, and we have a lot of death and so on related to it. So the more the community knows about this global health threat, the more we’re able to combat it. So we had a competition where persons in the community could participate, create videos or posters that inform on drug-resistance and how to prevent it, how to be safer and more careful with the use of anti-microbials.  It’s a difficult topic to digest, it’s big words, but we want to make it accessible to everyone.”

Marion Ali

“Okay, so you had winners.”

Dr Tamarie Rocke

“Yes, we had winners from all different walks of life. We had students that are at the University of Belize, that are medical students, we had medical doctors who competed and won some of our prizes, we had other people that – even high schoolers – that contributed, so we know that even school-aged kids can consume this information, understand it and translate it to people in their same age groups. From the One Health sector first prize went to Dr Joslyn Blanco, who is a doctor for N.H.I., and second prize was Dr Laura Friesen and her sister, Felecia Friesen and third prize was Ms Maria de la Luz Vasquez who works at the Ministry of Health and Wellness.  The winner of the tertiary level was Rheema Emmanuel who is a student at the University of Belize and she created a video to explain why AMR is so important and where you can catch it and second place was Bruno Juliet, who is a student at CAHSCIU – the Central American Health Sciences University and third place was Ramanakeerthy Manikandan from the same school. “

First prize winners received lap tops, second prize finishers received tablets, and third place finishers got gift bags.