CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

IN BRIEF

REVIEWS

TUTORIAL

VIEWS & POSITIONS

EVENTS DIARY

LETTERS

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Issue 2, September 1997

ISSN 1368-1591

OMNI at MEDNET 97

The Society for the Internet in Medicine and the OMNI Project are pleased to announce that the 3rd OMNI Seminar will take place at MEDNET 97, in Brighton on 5th November.

OMNI's 3rd Seminar, subtitled "The Cure for Information Overload", will showcase several projects and services funded by the Higher Education Funding Councils for the benefit of the higher education and research communities in the United Kingdom. These include:

DERWeb

Based at the University of Sheffield, DERWeb is the UKs premier resource for dental education resources. DERWeb maintains an image library, a database of teaching materials, an online bookshop and acts as designer and maintainer of web sites for many dentistry organisations.

MIDRIB

MIDRIB aims to create, maintain and deliver a comprehensive collection of medical images in digital form, for use in teaching and research. The project is gathering the best of existing collections from respected professional sources, and drawing them together into a coherent resource. This will be available free to medical and healthcare faculties of UK Universities and teaching hospitals, via the academic network.

OMNI

On the second anniversary of OMNI's birth on the World Wide Web, OMNI will review the services development, report on the options for searching the Web for biomedicine today and look forward to the future for eLib's Access to Network Resources projects.

The Seminar will also include a major discussion event on Internet MEDLINE, with contributions from users, providers and information specialists.

The OMNI Seminar will be an integral part of MEDNET 97. Attendees will register with MEDNET as day visitors and will receive full delegate access to the rest of the conference, including the technical programme, the workshop sessions and the exhibition.

MEDNET 97 congress co-ordinator Ramsey Badawi says:

Easy access to medical information on the Internet is in the process of revolutionising both the practice of medicine and the public's knowledge of it. In this context the contribution of projects such as OMNI, which provide ordered and reviewed indexes to high-quality medical material cannot be overstated.

Bringing together the OMNI Annual Seminar and the World Congress on the Internet in Medicine is going to be an extremely effective way of publicising the importance of this work and of allowing the rest of the medical community to benefit from it.

Sue Welsh, OMNI Project Manager, commented:

Past OMNI seminars have concentrated on informing the information and library community about OMNI's work. By integrating OMNI's annual meeting into MEDNET, a major international conference, we aim both to reach a new audience and to offer our existing audience an event with more variety and greater scope.

I am pleased that we can enhance MEDNET's already impressive programme, and urge anyone with an interest in the quality of Internet resources to register for MEDNET on November 5th.

For more information contact:
Ramsey Badawi, e-mail: ramseyb@gerbil.umds.ac.uk.

New medical Web pages at Mailbase

Mailbase has 120 medical discussion lists. Some of the topics covered include research into drug misuse, Downs syndrome, seronegative arthritis and eye movement studies. Details of all public medical lists (84) can be found on the new Mailbase medical Web pages at:

Medicine and Dentistry:
<URL:http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/category/A.html>

Subjects Allied to Medicine:
<URL:http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/category/B.html>

Biosciences Lists:
<URL:http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/category/C.html>

Alternatively, follow the Discussion Lists link from the Mailbase Web site at:

<URL:http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/>

Here you can see a description of each list and you can read messages sent to the list to get an overview of the discussion.

What is Mailbase?

Mailbase is a unique service which provides scholarly electronic discussion lists, information sharing facilities and a high level of user support. To ensure quality discussion, only lists which benefit UK research and teaching are set up at Mailbase. Currently there are over 1 700 lists, six percent of which are medical related.

Medical lists

Some of the Mailbase lists with the highest volume of messages are in the medical area. Lists which have over 100 messages per month are: gp-uk, physio, psychiatric-nursing and podiatry.

The physio list, for example, averages 176 messages per month and recent discussion has covered knee pain, lumbar fusion, portable parallel bars, Bell's palsy and hypertrophy. Physio has 1 241 members - researchers, educators, practitioners, students, administrators - from all over the world.

Setting up a new list

If your particular subject area or field of research is not represented on Mailbase, then a new list can be set up. Members of staff from UK higher education institutions can apply to set up a new list and details can be found on the Mailbase web site.

User support

Mailbase can help you to promote net awareness and to encourage the use of discussion lists for communication and collaboration If you are interested in a Mailbase presentation for UK academics or would like to find out more then please contact mailbase-helpline@mailbase.ac.uk.

Current awareness

Details of all new public lists on Mailbase are announced on the new-lists list. You can join this list by sending the following command, substituting appropriately, to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk:

join new-lists firstname(s) lastname
stop

Alternatively, you can browse the archives of new-list messages at:

<URL:http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/new-lists/archive.html>

Further details

Further details about the work of Mailbase can be found on the World-Wide Web at :

<URL:http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/>

Fo obtain a quick guide to using Mailbase, send the following e-mail message to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk:

send mailbase user-card
stop

For more information contact:
Elaine Blair, e-mail: e.h.blair@newcastle.ac.uk.

Is healthcare ready for the Internet?

The HOST Fall meeting, Is Healthcare Ready for the Internet? will be held November 13-14, 1997 in Washington, D.C.

Is Healthcare Ready for the Internet? will focus on the issues important to the continued development of healthcare on the Internet. Healthcare practitioners and clinicians will discuss critical issues, and explore how these issues have affected their current projects. Vendors and technologists will respond to the issues raised in a series of panels and workshops.

In addition, participants will have the opportunity to browse through our exhibition hall and see some of the latest developments in healthcare informatics. Vendors interested in reserving space should contact Lori Lovejoy at llovejoy@hostnet.org.

For additional information on our Fall meeting, see our WWW site or contact HOST at meeting@hostnet.org:

<URL:http://www.hostnet.org>

For more information contact:
Lori Lovejoy, e-mail: llovejoy@hostnet.org.

Eurosurveillance Weekly

The award-winning Eurosurveillance Weekly Web site has attracted a global readership since its launch on the Internet in June. The site publishes timely authoritative scientific information on communicable disease developments of European significance for public health professionals:

Eurosurveillance Weekly:
<URL:http://www.eurosurv.org>

Eurosurveillance Weekly has been the first to publish several early and preliminary outbreak reports from European Union countries, averaging one exclusive news item each week. Reports have covered newly observed trends, outbreaks of Escherichia coli O157, and increases in national figures for meningococcal disease and campylobacter (Spain), Salmonella typhimurium DT12 (Finland), parvovirus B19 and gonorrhoea (England & Wales), Staphylococcus aureus (Scotland), and syphilis (the Netherlands); and public health policy developments are reported. Events such as a case of diphtheria imported into England and the first outbreak of cryptosporidiosis associated with filtered borehole water have also featured, as well as news of HIV, hepatitis C virus, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. All back issues are available at the Web site.

The editorial team's priority is to ensure that all information is 100% accurate. To do this in such a short time (reports are sometimes received only hours before posting on the website) requires an international network of reliable sources. A national 'gatekeeper', who in most cases is the editor of the country's surveillance bulletin, clears, checks and reports news, and items involving more than one country are seen by all concerned; news is finally approved by the scientific editors. In the event of a sudden serious communicable disease threat, news updates can increase in frequency to enable an international incident team to inform professionals and scientists throughout the world as events occur. As yet, this mechanism has not been tested in a serious outbreak situation.

Users register once to join the subscription list of the Web site, and thereafter receive a weekly news update by e-mail. Those without access to the Internet receive Eurosurveillance Weekly as a text file, but the response from readers so far suggests that the interactive qualities of the Web site add an extra dimension to simple news reporting. In twelve weeks the subscriber base has grown to over 1 000 readers, with only 50 of these receiving the text file. Readers of the Web site recently voted Eurosurveillance Weekly Starting Point Hot Site; their comments to the editors have been extremely positive and encouraging. Eurosurveillance Weekly has been funded as a one-year feasibility study by Directorate General V of the European Commission. Readers' support is essential to the project's continued success.

For more information contact:
Caron Röhsler, e-mail: eurowkly@eurosurv.org.

Health crisis and the Internet

The World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization and Colombia's Ministry of Health are organizing Health Crisis and the Internet: an International Meeting on Harnessing the Internet for Disasters and Epidemics, from 18 to 21 November 1997 in Bogota, Colombia. The results of this meeting will have a major impact on communications among emergency managers during crises, and is co-sponsored by almost 20 regional and international organizations and agencies.

The objective of this meeting is to encourage participants to exchange information and make recommendations on using the Internet for preparedness planning, strategic decision making, and operational coordination of health crises. The meeting is aimed at experts from a variety of sectors involved in crisis management, such as health sector disaster coordinators, quarantine officers, Civil Defense or national emergency officers, representatives of agencies involved in disaster reduction or emerging infectious diseases, public and private sector representatives involved in telecommunications and information transfer, humanitarian and health-related NGOs, academics, and individuals with a particular interest in Internet applications.

The URL for the Web site on the Meeting is:

<URL:http://www.paho.org/english/disaster.htm>

For more information contact:
Ricardo Pérez, e-mail: perezric@paho.org.

Society for the Internet in Medicine

Comments to: simq@cybertas.demon.co.uk

Copyright © 1997 Society for the Internet in Medicine. All rights reserved.
Date: September 29, 1997
Document URL: http://www.cybertas.demon.co.uk/simq/issue2/announcements.html