Medical Charities often jostle for space in a crowded landscape for raising disease awareness. The success of the 'glamour' diseases like Breast Cancer, shows that marketing a disease 'brand' can be everything for the success of a fundraising campaign.

But what about diseases that are decidedly non glamorous and almost taboo? I speak of the diseases I work on, those infections that affect the gastrointestinal tract. Particularly those, like the hospital superbug Clostridium difficle (C diff), that can cause explosive diarrhea, inflamed bowels and toxic mega colon (which I'm sure is as awful as it sounds!)

I have been invited to speak at to a group American philanthropists at an international C. diff awareness meeting by the organizers from http://cdifffoundation.org/ November 9th, 2015 at the “Raising C. diff. and Healthcare-Associated Infection Awareness” conference. This organisation found me via my use of the twitter hash tag #cdiff and I think this is a good opportunity to talk about  my research on C diff and an old arthritis drug, Auranofin.

The aim of this new Pozible campaign is to raise funds for a C diff awareness animated video (perhaps with a talking toilet?) that has a dual purpose. It can be used by my hosts in Nov 2015, the C Diff Foundation, for education and also allows me to communicate my research plans to a larger philanthropic audience (perhaps to help raise research funds in a more traditional way?)

To pay for the professional animation services of James Hutson from Bridge 8 to make and edit a public awareness video on the topic of Clostridium difficile super bug infections, how they can be prevented with basic hygiene and my proposed new treatment for this deadly (and decidedly unglamourous) disease using an old arthritis drug.

Professional Animation Costs for a 2 min video = $10,000
Editing costs to make a short and longer versions of the awareness video? = Extra $750

This project is not to directly fund research in my laboratory, but is part of a two step strategy to fund a larger amount of money for a clinical trial for re-purposing an old drug to be used to treat this deadly super bug. We aim to make a fabulous awareness video but then fail in our ultimate goal to use this video as leverage for other sources of philanthropic donations. But the legacy of the awareness video could be that it is used to educate health professionals and inform the public about the dangers of this hospital acquired infection.