BMJ No 7132 Volume 316
Information in practice Saturday 28 Febuary 1998
Netlines
Office of Alternative Medicine
 |  | It's not just the big organisations that are using the web these days. Martin Schweiger, a consultant in communicable disease control, uses the web to publish a monthly newsletter about infectious diseases for general practitioners in Leeds (http://www.schwefam.demon.co.uk/germ.htm). While the web page design is none too fancy, the format seems to work, with some general practitioners preferring the web edition to the "dead tree" version. |
Self help
| | Patient Information Publications is a partnership of two general practitioners from Newcastle upon Tyne, who aim to provide information about health related matters that can be understood by non-medical people. Their Patient UK website (http://www.patient.co.uk/) provides a wealth of information for patients, including a section on self help and support groups in the United Kingdom (http://www.patient.org.uk). |
Tale of two wisdoms
| | WISDOM
(http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/wrp/index.html)
is a pilot project based at the University of Sheffield and funded by
the NHS Executive to create an online environment, using the internet
to train primary care professionals in informatics. The site features
plenty of links and some online seminars on evidence based practice
(http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/wrp/seminar.html),
and is accompanied by an archived email discussion forum via mailbase
(http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/wisdom).
WISDOM is also the name of a suite of databases produced by the Information Service at the Wellcome Trust (http://wisdom.wellcome.ac.uk/) which includes information on research funding, job vacancies, and science policy. |
Urology site
| | Chris Dawson, a consultant urologist in Peterborough, has recently developed a website for his department (http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~fc.dawson/index.htm), which features a variety of information on urology. |
Government information wants to be free!
| | We, the people, can now watch our own government in action over the web, thanks to the online version of Hansard (http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm/cmhansrd.htm). A new edition appears each day at 12 30 pm, and you can search an online archive to see what MPs have been saying about health or other matters - for example, a query with the search term "Barts" brought up 56 entries. Other selected House of Commons publications are on http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm/cmpubns.htm, and the recent London Review Report is on http://www.open.gov.uk/doh/lhsrev/lhsrevh.htm. |
The virtual autopsy
| | The Department of Pathology at Leicester has produced a Virtual Autopsy (http://www.le.ac.uk/pathology/teach/VA/index.html) where you can examine an online cadaver, working through images and relevant signs until you are confident of the cause of death. |
Finding the way
| | If you want to include a map in your website or send people
directions by email in the form of a URL, try
http://www.streetmap.co.uk. You can call up
road maps of anywhere in mainland Britain by post code, grid reference,
or town name, and you can get detailed street maps of Greater London.
For example, to locate the BMJ's headquarters
use this URL:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/
streetmap.dll?Postcode2Map?WC1H+9JR&title=
BMJ +HQ&back=BMJ+Home+Page&url=http://www.bmj.com. Also provided are links to local restaurants, pubs, cinemas, etc. A similar but more comprehensive service is available for American addresses from http://www.four11.com. |
Food for Our Future
| | For discussion of the benefits and anxieties arising from the application of biotechnology to food production see the Food for Our Future site on http://www.foodfuture.org.uk/index2.htm. |
Rumours of war
| | In the current "rumours of war" climate, readers might be interested to read a study published by the US Air War College on the "Battlefield Of The Future, 21st Century Warfare Issues" (http://www.cdsar.af.mil/battle/front.html), which covers not just biological warfare but also information warfare. Also worth visiting is the web version of a recent Scientific American article, "The Specter of Biological Weapons" by Leonard A Cole (http://www.sciam.com/1296issue/1296cole.html), which comes packed with links to relevant online data, an article on "The Great CyberWar of 2002" by John Arquila in Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/6.02/index.html) and Bradford University's Department of Peace Studies (http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/peace/) and associated Centre for Conflict Resolution (http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/confres/crchome.html). |
Campylobacter on line
| | Sequencing of the genome of Campylobacter jejuni is currently under way at the Sanger Centre, near Cambridge (http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Projects/C_jejuni/). For a comprehensive list of links to online information on campylobacter, visit the new campylobacter genome website on http://www.medmicro.mds.qmw.ac.uk/campylobacter/. |
Compiled by Mark Pallen
email
m.pallen@qmw.ac.uk
web page
http://www.qmw.ac.uk/~rhbm001/mpallen.html
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