Saudi Gazette report

JEDDAH — Students from Ibn Sina National College for Medical Studies (ISNC) recently organized an awareness campaign regarding allergy and annual check-up. The aim of the campaign was to create an awareness on allergy among the visitors, answer their questions, provide preventive measures and substitutes for each allergy type and to ‏encourage the target population to go for annual checkups.

‏The two projects “My body is attacking and annual checkup:a key for a healthy life” were supervised by Prof. Amal Said (professor in medical immunity and microbiology).

Allergy incidents have increased not only in Saudi Arabia but also around the world and the actual cause for the increase is still unknown. But a number of hypotheses have been linked to this phenomenon and they are under debate by a lot of scientists and researchers. Moreover, annual checkup has also been ignored by a lot of people in Saudi Arabia.

In terms of the campaign’s layout, students provided separate corners for educating visitors about allergy types, causes and symptoms of food allergy, available tests for diagnosis of food allergy, possible treatment methods and preventive measures to decrease its incidence, substitutes for food allergens and ways in which parents can deal with their allergic child. As for the annual checkup, corners mainly dealt with providing information about the most important checkup tests.

The students (Rana Ali Arab, Raha Garout, Reema Howaidi, Rowan Shosho, Aljawhara Hijji, Kolthoum Fallatah, Ethar Alreheily, Raneem Aljuhani, Reem Aladwani, Shaug Alghamdi, Aseel Jarwan, Nada Alzahrani, Abdulaziz Bajubair and others) had an amazing experience communicating, educating and answering the questions of the general public. Also,they were thrilled to be able to carry similar events at other places in the future.