My name is Isabella Yang, and I founded BeyondAntibiotics. Apart from anthropology, I love sports, cats, puzzles and Disney! Ever since I was a child, my grandmother who was a barefoot doctor at 14, would tell me stories of how she treated cases with strange herbs as medications such as antibiotics were scarce. This inspired me to explore deeper into the history of antibiotics from multiple perspectives.
Using this platform, we hope to help visualise and educate about the development of allocation and public perceptions of medications across generations from personal experience. Ultimately, we want to build a sustainable community that learns from the past, promotes the responsible use of antibiotics in the present, and safeguards their effectiveness for future generations to come.
Medicine carries more than a cure;
it carries memory, trust, and the stories of those who used it before us.
5.2.1 The Picture Book: Penny’s Mission
Penny’s Mission: The Story of Antibiotics is a bilingual picture book I created to turn scientific research into a story that is easier for children and families to understand. The main character, Penny, is a small antibiotic helper based on penicillin. Through her journey, the book explains that antibiotics can help fight bacteria, but they cannot treat viruses such as the common cold or flu. It also introduces the problem of antibiotic resistance through the character Muck, a resistant bacterium covered in “Resistance Mud”.
The story connects everyday medicine use with larger public health ideas, including responsible antibiotic use, resistance, AWaRe classification, and One Health. By using soft illustrations and character-based storytelling, the book aims to make a complex medical topic feel approachable without losing its scientific meaning.
5.2.2 From Book to Hospital and Community Spaces
After completing the picture book, I brought it beyond the website and placed printed copies in hospitals and community healthcare spaces. These are places where questions about infection, medicine, and antibiotic use often appear in everyday life. By placing the book in these settings, I hoped it could reach not only students, but also children, parents, and patients who may encounter antibiotics in real medical contexts.
This part of the project explores how visual storytelling can support public health education. Instead of presenting antibiotic resistance only through data or medical language, the picture book uses characters, narrative, and familiar situations to open up conversations about when antibiotics are needed, when they are not, and why using them wisely matters.
Later, I held a second picture book sharing session in the Primary School section of Harrow Beijing. This time, I introduced the story to younger students and used a more visual and accessible way to explain the difference between bacteria and viruses, the idea of antibiotic resistance, and why medicine should be used carefully. Their questions and reactions helped me understand how scientific ideas can be adapted for different age groups.
Together, these two workshops showed how a picture book can move beyond the page and become a starting point for discussion. By combining storytelling, illustration, and interaction, Penny’s Mission brought antibiotic education into a real school community.
My classmates and I reading Penny’s Mission together during the workshop