Outreach

The Bug Off! campaign

The Bug Off! travel health awareness campaign has reached a global audience of 25 million since its inception. We have had over 25,000 conversations with families, young people, holidaymakers, healthcare workers, industry representatives – all united by an interest in staying safe whilst travelling abroad.

We’re proud to have inspired countless families to better protect themselves from the threat of vector borne diseases, and educated many travellers about the importance of using repellents when visiting tropical countries.

For more information, visit www.bug-off.org

Healthy home, healthy family programme

In response to the disruption of national vector control programs and diversion of resources to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched our ‘Healthy home, healthy family’ mobile communication programme in 2020.

We use mass mobile technology to communicate clear and effective guidance to enable vulnerable individuals to make educated decisions about how they can keep their home safe from COVID-19, malaria and other life-threating diseases.

The programme was successfully launched in Mali, and has since expanded into Malawi, with Ministry of Health-approved messaging on vector control and hygiene practices released onto a toll-free helpline ‘3-2-1’. So far, our messages have been listened to more than 3 million times by phone users in Mali.

The ACHIEVE campaign

We teamed up with children’s illustrator Lydia Monks to create a new, trusted character called ‘Dr Dog’. The ‘Dr Dog’ e-books have had 25,000 online downloads and became a recommended resource by the UK’s Department for Education.

For older children, we worked with Twinkl to developed innovative resources on germs, handwashing, vaccines and the immune system, disseminated via STEM Learning, Mumsnet and the British Science Association.

We also created a short online course on the science behind COVID-19 for teenagers, hosted on the Open University’s Open Learn Create platform.