The 6th of July was the first birthday of the PuckerUp4PH campaign.  Campaign director Paul Pennington was joined by the Chairman of the Pulmonary Hypertension Association UK, Iain Armstrong, for a series of radio interviews with BBC and independent stations to launch the campaign and talk about PH.  Huge thanks to all the PHA UK members who shared their PH journey with listeners from Chorley to Qatar.  Below you can click on the links to listen to the audio from these interviews.

BBC Radio Jersey – Iain Armstrong & Paul Pennington

BBC Radio Leicester – Jenny Leafe & Iain Armstrong

BBC Radio Northampton – Jacqui & Mark Boldy

BBC Radio Kent – Lucinda Duxbury Smith & Iain Armstrong

Chorley FM – Iain Armstrong & Paul Pennington

Hope FM – Paul Pennington

Whilst in the studios at BBC Radio Northampton, Jacqui Boldy didn’t waste any time in getting her favourite radio DJ Bernie Keith to slap on some blue lippy and PuckerUp4PH!

We were delighted also to see photographs of the cast of  the popular West End Musical ‘Wicked’ feature in a med-ed press article on Health Republic.  The Wicked cast recently were kind enough to spare some time from their hectic performing schedule to Pucker Up and send some blue lip prints and photos of their antics back to us.

Congratulations to PHA Israel, who launched their own push to get as many blue lip prints as possible today in Tel Aviv with the creative idea of staging a kissing wall.  A more detailed round up with photos and hopefully some video to follow in the next day!

Also to come is the full story of the inspiring efforts of the Grupo de Apoyo para Pacientes de Hipertensión Pulmonar en Puerto Rico from their first ambitious event at the Plaza Las Americas a few weeks back to yesterday’s kiss collecting at the Hospital Auxilio Mutuo in San Juan!

The media team in the UK have been busying themselves engaging with radio, newspapers, magazine, tv and the world of theatre.

We’ve got a great bunch of PHA-UK members who are sharing their journeys and desire to spread awareness of PH with the media here, and a growing number of folk planning events, stalls parties, school days, car boot sales/swap meets… people wanting to do something/anything in Blue lips!  Your enthusiasm is really infectious.  Thank you.

The recent great weather has meant lots of people are eating al fresco., so we said, why not blue lip barbecues?!  (We have an article in the latest PHA UK newsletter on barbecuing and barbecue health as the amount of cases of food poisoning go through the roof at this time of the year here in the UK. We also look at the step by step approach to putting on an event -PHA UK have a great team in there main office who can help you if you are in the UK, so just email office@phassociation.uk.com.

Sausage sizzles do amazingly well ‘down under’….the art of people being allowed to cook and provide sausages for folk in return for a donation to a charity, which normally takes place at stalls by large retail outlets Oz…why not a barbecue equivalent at home, picnic areas, at the beach, but where everyone gets blue lipped and provides a print on to one of our entry forms (providing a signature and printed name) and perhaps a donation that could go to your PH patient support charity.

A big thank you to everyone who gave a lip print at the US international conference, which I hear was a fantastic success. Congratulations to the organisers, the clinical and pharma communities and of course everyone who attended and took part.

We hear our film was very well recieved on Sunday morning and we have many hundreds of Blue lip prints to add to the growing tally. We are a long, long, long way off what we need, so I hope what we said in that film has stuck with you and that you’ve gone back to your communities and thought, “Right. What can I do to help?!” and are busying yourselves and others planning kiss collecting and PH awareness events.

Next week we’ll be unveiling a new tool in the push to raise PH awareness…30,000 free, environmentally friendly, mobile advertisements for PH and its symptoms, impact etc.  Send us an email at lips@puckerup4ph.com to find out more.

Website visits are up and whilst its always great to welcome back new friends we really like the fact that we’ve got new people logging on and spending a few minutes to read about the condition, see the films and our photo gallery.