Interasma

An interdisciplinary, international health organization devoted entirely to "all aspects of asthma." A global affiliate of the World Allergy Organization. Especially concerned with bringing asthma researchers and clinical practitioners together to improve the quality of life for asthma sufferers worldwide. Members receive free print subscriptions to ACI International, Interasma's official organ. Holds regular congresses.

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General medical society for Argentinean physicians. Among other features, the site affords opportunities for cybercourses. (Primarily Spanish-language contents; ethics code in English and in Greek.)

Canadian Medical Association/Association médicale canadienne

"The national voice" of Canadian physicians. Offers news, a large links collection, practice management tools, extensive clinical reference cybertools, CMA journals and magazines, and continuing education opportunities. Click on "Site Map" for a quick glance at which features are members-only. (English, French)

New Zealand Doctor Online

La Societa' Italiana di Medicina Generale (SIMG)

Italy's general medical society. Lays out mission, structure, and activities of the organization; includes contact details. The "Area Pneumologica" should be of most interest to ACII readers. Also offers online issues of the SIMG magazine and many medical links. (Italian)

VOLC-R: Primary Care Resources on the Internet



World Organization of Family Doctors/Global Family Doctor

Singapore-based, international network concerned with standards of care in general practice/family medicine. Promotes sharing of educational resources between doctors in wealthier and poorer countries. Free registration necessary to access most parts of the site. (Mostly English operations; does a have a Chinese-language E-mail list)

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

United States federal government agency's vast and accessible repository of online public health information. US-oriented, but valued by health care workers around the world. Allows for free E-mail subscriptions to selected CDC periodicals, including the famous Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) and Emerging Infectious Diseases. (Some materials in Spanish.)

SATELLIFE

International nonprofit organization that bridges "the digital divide" between health professionals in wealthier and poorer nations. Operates HealthNet, a growing global communications network that makes the medical riches of the Internet available to thousands of health care workers in the Two-Thirds World, especially in Africa. Also offers these specialized affiliate sites: AFRO-NETS (electronic conference on African health care); E-DRUG (electronic conference on access to essential medicines); ProCOR (preventive cardiology initiative for the developing world); and ProCAARE (international HIV/AIDS initiative).

UNAIDS

Joint effort of six United Nations agencies and the World Bank to prevent and ameliorate the worldwide medical and social consequences of HIV/AIDS. A huge mission and a huge website. (Some French, Russian, and Spanish documents.)

World Health Organization

Major United Nations agency that famously defines health as a "state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Information on its programs, publications, and a broad variety of health issues can be found in abundance here. (Includes Spanish and French materials.)

WWW Virtual Library: Public Health

Over 1400 links to international and national government health programs, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and educational sites. Created on a volunteer basis by Eberhard Wenzel, who taught public health at Brisbane, Australia's Griffith University. Organized geographically and topically. No longer being updated; will be kept online at least until April 2003.

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European Respiratory Society

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Body authorized by the European Union to standardize and improve medical specialist care, including that provided by allergologists, in member countries. Focuses on standards for education and training. (English, French)

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SEARCH TOOLS, INTERNET

GENERAL

Canadian information management tools company offering software packages that allow use of multiple Internet search systems at the same time. The most basic Copernic software is available as a free download in English, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish versions.

Yahoo!

Free search system that runs search terms against an extensive directory of hierarchically organized topic categories and website home pages. Users who prefer a language other than English or a geographical focus other than the US can simply go to the bottom of the home page and click on one of the Local Yahoo! sites based elsewhere in the Americas, Europe, or the Asia Pacific region.

MEDICAL

Directed by Bernd Sebastian Kamps, MD, Ph.D, who also serves as Senior Editor for the German-language site HIV.NET. Offers customized medical literature tracking services free of charge "thanks to generous unrestricted educational grants provided by AMGEN, Berlex, Eisai, Glaxo Wellcome, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Schering AG."

FreeBooks4Doctors

AMEDEO affiliate that brings together over 550 medical texts available for free cyberreading. Books are sorted alphabetically and then again by specialty and by language. Visitors are invited to recommend online medical texts. (English site linking thus far to texts in English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Catalan, Spanish, Turkish, and Romanian)

The Free Medical Journals Site

Another AMEDEO affiliate. Offers an ever-growing collection of direct links to over 970 biomedical publications that can be accessed online in full-text form at no charge. Like the FreeBooks4Doctors, these journals are sorted principally by medical specialty and language. Visitors can recommend new ones--although you do not need to recommend ACI International because someone already has! (English site linking thus far to journals in English, Bahasa Indonesia, Czech, Dutch, Farsi/Persian, Turkish, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Norwegian, Greek, Ukrainian, Slovak, and Russian)

Health on the Net Foundation

Nonprofit organization devoted to improving the quality of online health care information. Based in Geneva, Switzerland. HON is best known for certifying health care websites that conform to its set of ethical guidelines, the HONcode, which can be viewed in any one of 17 languages. Also offers the search tools MedHunt, HonSelect, and HONcodeHunt; a multimedia center; a link to free MEDLINE; and other helpful features. (English, French)

ACI International - Journal of the World Allergy Organization subscribes to the HONcode principles. Verify here!

HighWire Press
(For faster access from selected countries outside the US, click here.)

"The Internet imprint of the Stanford University Libraries" in California, USA. "One of the two largest archives of free full-text science on Earth! As of 7/22/02, we are assisting in the online publication of 431,520 free full-text articles and 1,221,692 total articles." Site includes the capacity to search MEDLINE as well as HighWire publications.

Medical Matrix

US-based nonprofit "devoted to posting, annotating, and continuously updating 'full content, unrestricted access, Internet clinical medicine resources.'" Resources are ranked according to their point-of-care clinical applicability. We are pleased to tell you that Medical Matrix has awarded ACII - Journal of the World Allergy Organization a four-star rating. This means that our journal has been identified as an "outstanding site across all categories and a premier web page for [its] discipline." Note: Medical Matrix has changed from a free to a paid-subscriber service.

PubMed

Search tool offered by the US government's National Library of Medicine, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Provides free access to MEDLINE, the electronic, expanded version of the venerable Index Medicus. MEDLINE contains bibliographic citations from over 3,800 biomedical journals published from 1966 to the present. While most are English-language, a variety of languages are represented.

WebMedLit

Free literature tracking service sponsored by Silver Platter Information, a corporate publisher of electronic scholarly reference materials. Each day, WebMedLit scrutinizes a selection of general and specialty medical websites, then extracts citations, abstracts and full-text articles and organizes them by topic.

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SEQUENCE DATABASES

Asthma and Allergy Gene Database

Created and regularly updated by German physician and medical ethicist Mathias Wjst. Draws its information from published, peer-reviewed, English-language papers. Registration is necessary to access most of the site, but it is free, as is membership in an E-mail discussion list.

ExPASy

ExPASy (Expert Protein Analysis System) is the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) proteomics server. It includes, but is not limited to, SWISS-PROT (a primary sequence database), SWISS-2DPAGE (two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis database), and SWISS-3DIMAGE 3D (repository of biological macromolecule images). The home page links to alternate URLs based on servers outside Switzerland.

GenBank

A project of the US government's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a part of NIH. An ever-growing repository of all publicly available DNA sequences. A new version of the entire database is released every two months; however, submissions are accepted continuously.

HIV Molecular Immunology Database

Funded by the US government's Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and published by an interdisciplinary team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Seeks to comprehensively list defined HIV epitopes. Developed as a companion to the Division of AIDS-funded print reference work Human Retroviruses and AIDS Genetic Sequence Compendium. Now includes sequence, resistance, immunology, and vaccine trials databases.

International Immunogenetics Database (IMGT)

Reference concerning the gene families related to the immune response in humans and other vertebrate species. Specializes in the molecular genetics of immunoglobulins, T-cell receptors, and major histocompatibility complex (MHC) markers. Started by Marie-Paule Lefranc, a professor of biochemistry, molecular, and human genetics at the Universite of Montpellier II (France) and still operated by her in partnership with the European Union and the European Bioinformatics Institute, among other agencies.

Kabat Database of Sequences of Proteins of Immunological Interest

Originally created as a book in 1970 by Elvin A. Kabat (1914-2000), the founder of immunochemistry. After five editions, it grew too large and unwieldy for print and was put into an electronic format. Since Kabat's death, it has been maintained by George Johnson and Tai Te Wu on a server at Northwestern University in the Chicago, USA metropolitan area. The latest dataset went online February 22, 2002.

MHCPEP

Available on the server of Australia's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, an affiliate of the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Although no new additions have been made since June, 1998, it still contains over 13,000 entries on over 9,000 peptides that have been shown to bind with MHC molecules. Originally compiled by Vladimir Brusic.

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TRANSLATION TOOLS (HUMAN-LANGUAGE)

Free, computerized web page translator under the auspices of the Altavista search engine. Check to see which languages are currently available. A general caveat regarding any machine translator: while it may provide a rough, preliminary idea of a website's contents, it should not be relied upon exclusively, especially for medical and scientific queries that require very precise answers. Babel Fish, for example, reportedly has a 20% inaccuracy rate.

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TREATMENT PRODUCTS

UCB Group

International pharmaceutical and chemical firm headquartered in Belgium and active in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Its Pharma Sector focuses on developing drugs for the central nervous system and the respiratory system. The above-mentioned URL is oriented to European health care professionals and patients. The corporate headquarters website is accessible here. One of the company's best-known products is the antihistamine cetirizine hydrochloride, labelled in the United States as Zyrtec^TM. For the Zyrtec^TM product site, US patients and professionals can click here.

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