This year's Young Scientists are investigating running backwards, getting hands super-clean, preventing skin cancer and stopping smoking, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL
COULD RUNNING backwards help people with asthma? How do you encourage teens to quit smoking? What do people really feel about swine flu? And can UV light provide a convenient boost for hand hygiene?
Those are some of the health-related questions being tackled by students in the final of this year’s BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, which kicks off next week at the RDS in Dublin. A record-breaking 1,588 projects from 329 schools were entered this year, with 520 selected for the final.
One project looks at a potentially simple intervention to help people with asthma build up fitness and lung function – by running backwards. It sounds bizarre, but keen runner and transition-year student Niamh Byrne from Presentation De La Salle College in Bagenalstown, Co Carlow, hit on the idea while reading her father’s book.
“I read that running backwards is very good for the lungs and I wondered whether it could help asthmatics,” she says. “I got together groups of non-asthmatics and asthmatics and I divided those groups into backwards runners, forwards runners and non-runners.”
Byrne worked with her teachers and Dr Rod McLoughlin from the Irish Institute of Sport to devise a five-week outdoor training programme and monitored each runner’s heart rate before and after each session.
With the help of the Asthma Society of Ireland she also collected data on lung function, and she compared participant fitness levels before and after the five-week period.
While the final results have yet to be compiled, the runners already report feeling fitter and Byrne reckons the backwards runners got the most out of the project. “Running backwards is tougher on your body and that’s how it gets you fitter,” she explains, adding that she had found no studies in the medical literature that had looked specifically at the effects of backwards running on asthma.
Lung function was also on the minds of three students at Deele College in Lifford, Co Donegal, who were concerned at the high level of smoking among their peers. “A high percentage of students in our school smoke, around 71 per cent, and we wanted to lower that with our project,” says Taylor Gallagher. She and students Louise McClay and Michael Friel decided to focus on the story of Bryan Lee Curtis, who started smoking at 13 and died of lung cancer aged 33.
The students (none of whom is a smoker) contacted Curtis’s widow, Bobbie, in the US and worked with teachers Mary Gibbons and Brendan O’Donoghue to show a DVD about Curtis and his illness to groups of students from two schools.
“The DVD showed some shocking images of him on his deathbed, and we got people’s thoughts and reactions through surveys,” says Gallagher, who notes the approach has already started to deliver. “We have had one success – a girl who is 14 who is quitting.”
Awareness is also a key issue in another lung-related illness: swine flu. “We wanted to study it because it’s so relevant,” says Laura Fitton, a transition-year student at Coláiste Choilm in Ballincollig, Co Cork. She worked alongside Jessica Sheehan and Cynthia Ebere Anaba to survey school students and local medical professionals and businesses about attitudes towards pandemic H1N1. “We were looking to see were people afraid of it,” says Fitton.
Some 13 per cent of respondents to their questionnaire said they were afraid of swine flu, while 87 per cent had few concerns. “Mostly we found that the people who weren’t scared of it didn’t know anything about it,” says Fitton.
And speaking of bugs, two enterprising students at Presentation Secondary School in Thurles came up with a device for their project to improve hand hygiene in the bathroom by using UV-C light to tackle bacteria left over after conventional handwashing and drying.
Kate Kerrane and Etaoin O’Meara came up with the idea when they heard that hand-dryers can leave live bacteria on the skin. “We went on the internet and we came across information on UV-C killing bacteria, which was being used to clean surfaces,” explains Kerrane.
To test out their invention, they asked 15 students to use the bathroom, then wash and dry their hands as usual and place their palms on to clean agar plates straight afterwards. Next the volunteers put their hands into the light box for a defined time, then finally back onto another clean agar plate.
“It came out that before the UV was used there were loads of bacteria on their hands, but after the UV almost all the bacteria were gone,” says Kerrane. Based on their results, between 10 and 20 seconds of exposure to the UV lamps was enough to kill the bacteria left on the skin’s surface after conventional hand drying.
The students were careful to choose UV-C for their device, but a project by students at St Gerard’s School in Bray, Co Wicklow, highlights a lack of awareness around the effects of more damaging UV wavelengths in sunlight on our skin.
Public surveys by transition-year students Neil Counihan, Alan Smith and Declan Keaney indicate that people in Ireland use too low a factor of sunscreen on their skins and that they underestimate how frequently sun protection has to be reapplied to be effective.
“The incidence of skin cancer in Ireland is higher than the European average and we wanted to see what the habits were at home,” explains teacher Catherine O’Dwyer, who notes that around 6,000 new cases of skin cancer are diagnosed in Ireland each year. “Hardly anyone seemed to think that skin cancer was a problem here. Nor were people aware that it only takes two or three serious sunburns to double the risk of developing melanoma.”
The BT Young Scientist Technology Exhibition 2010 runs at the Main Hall, RDS, Dublin 4 from January 12 to 16 and is open to the public from January 14 to 16. Tickets €12 for adults, €6 for student/ concession and €25 for a family of two adults and three children. See www.btyoungscientist.com or call 1800-924362