Health research data and other health data are increasingly stored in electronic format on networks, which enables faster and more flexible access to the literature. One of the most widely used on line databases in the health field is Medline, which contains more than 7.5 million citations from over 4000 biomedical journals and is international in scope. Increased access to the Internet will further facilitate worldwide distribution of health information. The Internet currently reaches an estimated 40 million people in 90 countries, and the number of its host computers is expected to exceed 100 million before the year 2000.
Language barriers serve to block the globalisation of health information resources. Although English is widely used in science, not everyone can communicate well in English. Much useful information in web sites on the Internet is in languages other than English. Only a few home pages that are in languages other than English provide abstracts in English. This restricts the sharing of information worldwide.
To help globalise health information further we are setting up a multilingual home page for the global health network (http://www.pitt.edu/HOME/GHNet/GHNet.html) on the Internet.(1)(2) The first step is to translate the English version into other languages so that more researchers and practitioners can use the home page in their mother tongue (a Japanese version is at http://www.pitt.edu/ROME/GHNet/GHNet-j.html). The second step is to build a home page dealing with health information available from countries where the home page is not in English. The third step will be to put a short description about the site, in English, into each foreign language site along with the email address of a person in charge of the site who can communicate in English. That person will serve as a contact when English speaking people access the site. Finally, we will either include computer assisted translation software among our site services or link our site to others providing such services. Such software now can provide a rough but usable translation, and its quality will improve in the coming years.
In this way, more data and findings from many countries will become available to researchers and practitioners worldwide. It will then be possible to surf across languages on home pages on the Internet.
AKIRA SEKIKAWA
Fellow, department of epidemiology
INGRID LIBMAN
Fellow, department of epidemiology
LUCIA IOCHIDA
Fellow
RONALD E LAPORTE
Professor, department of epidemiology
University of Pittsburgh,
Diabetes Research Center,
3460 Fifth Avenue,
Pittsburgh, PA 15213,
USA
EUGENE BOOSTROM
Senior public health specialist
World Bank,
1818 H Street NW,
Washington,
DC 20433,
USA
Reference
1 Global Health Network Task Force. Towards a global health network. Current issues in Public Health 1995;5:160-4.
2 LaPorte R E, Akazawa S, Boostrom E, Campos M, Gamboa C, Gooch T, et al Global public health and the information superhighway BMJ 1994;309:737.
