Ethical consent

As part of our project we had to submit several ethical forms which proved especially difficult for us as we are used to working with microbes which, luckily, have no problem being experimented on. So as we are planning on using children to illustrate our findings we had several problems which we faced with regard to several long winded forms for committees, departments, the school principles, the parents and the children.

The main problem was the consent forms for the children. As they are in primary school we had to find a way to explain to them what exactly we were planning on doing which included telling them what the human microbiome is.

We actually had a lot of fun coming up with the idea of telling the children that we were going to have them sing songs about the tiny animals which live inside their bodies. However, to make sure they weren’t terrified of the idea of millions of tiny creatures all over their bodies we added that they were responsible for keeping their bodies healthy and happy. And we are pretty sure if we tell them they are singing about faecal matter (poo) that they will be more than thrilled to take part in our study!