Eva - ARCHIE study

ARCHIE: The early use of Antibiotics in 'at Risk' Children with InfluEnza

Eva, aged 10 from Staffordshire says: 'I went to the Doctor with a really bad cough and because of our family history, we wanted to get it checked out. I have a condition that affects my breathing called asthma. A few years ago, my sister became really ill with a chest infection. She was rushed into hospital and had to go into intensive care. When I visited her, she was covered in tubes and asleep. A machine was breathing for her while the doctors tried to work out what was wrong. This got me interested in bio-medical science, because I knew when my sister was ill, people in a laboratory were trying to work out why she was sick.

'I want to be a bio-medical scientist, because I’d like to help people all around the world with conditions like my sister, or others, and help to work out what’s wrong with them. So when the Doctor asked if I would like to be part of the ARCHIE study, I was really interested and immediately said yes. The ARCHIE study is a piece of research trying to work out if giving early anti-biotics would reduce the chance of people like me, with conditions like asthma, getting a more serious infection.

The next day, a nurse came to my house and explained the study. She gave me a nose and throat swab. At first I didn’t like the sound of the throat swab, but when she did it, it just felt like a little tickle. Then I had to take banana medicine for a week, which could have been real or fake -  we didn’t know. It was a randomised test, which I thought was really cool. Then I had to take my temperature every day for a month. I would definitely recommend being part of a medical study like ARCHIE because it changed my experience of illness into a positive one and it’s nice to think it might help other children in the future like me and my sister. Hopefully one day, I’ll be the one in the laboratory analysing the results under a microscope.

Thank you ARCHIE study!