For those of you who don't know - it is world asthma day today (5th May). It is also the day that the Sir Henry Wellcome Laboratories were opened at Southampton General Hospital. The Wellcome trust and University have spent close to £10 million refurbishing and relocating all of the research laboratories within our division over the last 8 years or so and today they were officially opened. We had a big opening ceremony and a nice buffet after and all of the division were there.

Though one of the best things about the event was that the AAIR charity were there and had a sign up with the website www.justgiving.com/aair/raisemoney . I had not seen this before so thought I would use my tech savvy nature to try and drum up some support. I have recently started using Twitter (a microblogging service - ie like this but each message can be no more than 140 characters in length) and often see famous people "retweeting" (a tweet is what each blog entry is called so retweeting is when they repeat it on your behalf to get the message out to more people) about other causes such as World Malaria Day. So I thought I would give it a go. Jason Bradbury who is on the gadget show is a big fan of twitter so I sent him a message asking if he could retweet about the address and much to my surprise he did!!! It was very exciting! And it seems to be working as I have now seen many others also reposting the message. Lets hope it will help raise money. I have also sent the same message to a few other celebs on twitter so will have to see if they do too (I may end up bouncing off the walls with excitement if they do - never thought I'd be this star-struck!).

Anyway - I hope that it works as the more money that goes into the research the better - last thing we want is for the credit crunch to slow down the development of new treatments for asthma.

Anyway, I had better go, has been an exhausting day! I will try to update soon. Am off to my first international conference next week (assuming swine flu doesn't affect travel) so will let you know how I get on


xoxo