E-drug: About e-drug
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[The following information can be useful if kept and filed for future
reference. It provides details about how to subscribe and unsubscribe to
e-drug, protocols for submitting and signing messages to e-drug and a
summary of the aims, services and scope of e-drug.
BS Co-moderator]
Welcome to the e-drug mailing list!
If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list,
you can send mail to: "Majordomo@usa.healthnet.org"
with the following command in the body of your email message:
unsubscribe e-drug e-drug jandwa@osh.namib.com
Here's the general information for the list you've
subscribed to, in case you don't already have it:
Introduction
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The objective of "E-DRUG" is to support the concept of essential
drugs by improving and speeding up communications between all
health professionals working in the field of essential drugs.
Colleagues in developing countries often cannot afford telephone
and fax lines. Normal postal services are too slow and unreliable.
Many have already discovered the usefulness of email as an
affordable tool for communication. E-DRUG will be a free service
of HEALTHNET, and will only cost you the normal costs of
sending/receiving ordinary email messages.
A list "Who is where on email in essential drugs?" has been
maintained by the undersigned for one year. 266 people are now
listed, and the number is rapidly increasing. The critical mass
has been reached for setting up a discussion group, where
everybody can send a short question, pose a statement or give a
piece of useful information to all others.
E-DRUG has been specially designed for colleagues in countries
without access to interactive Internet tools such as WWW, gopher,
usenet and FTP mail. E-DRUG can be accessed by offline, ordinary
email messages. A technical user manual explaining all this is
attached by Healthnet.
E-DRUG can be used by everybody who has subscribed (see technical
information; there are no costs involved). E-DRUG can be used in
the following ways:
- send a question to all members (e.g., requesting suggestions as
how to lobby Parliament or the Medical Association etc.);
- by requesting a list of available files at E-DRUG. One of these
files will be the latest update of the "Who is where on email in
essential drugs" mailing list.
- inform all members about a new report, Essential Drug List,
National Drug Policy, Standard Treatment Guideline etc. by
informing all members in a short message, while making the actual
text available as a computer file that can be requested;
- all members will receive a (more or less) regular bulletin,
highlighting new developments, pointing at new, available files
etc. (same idea as the PHNFLASH bulletin, published weekly by the
Population, Health & Nutrition Unit of the World Bank; see the
"who is where on email in essential drugs" list for details as how
to subscribe);
- publicly available information sources (e.g., WHO/DAP
publications, the Model WHO Essential Drug List, the UNIPAC
Essential Drug price list, articles from the Essential Drug
Monitor or INRUD News) could be made available as downloadable
files.
E-DRUG is a voluntary initiative, and needs your help! Think about
useful pieces of information that you are willing to share with
your colleagues. You will find information in the technical manual
as how to send this information as a text file to E-DRUG.
E-DRUG should NOT be used for the following:
- commercial activities (no drug promotion, not even essential
ones);
- asking advice what drug to take by a patient (ask a health
professional).
E-DRUG will start in english, but a similar system could be opened
in spanish (MEDICAM-E) or french (E-MED) if there is enough
interest.
Subscribing
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To subscribe to the E-Drug electronic conference (which is moderated), send
e-mail to:
majordomo@usa.healthnet.org
************Do NOT send it to e-drug **************
Leave the Subject line blank (or put anything you like there), and write:
subscribe e-drug
(or subscribe e-drug-digest)
in the text space. Digests are normally up to 27 kb in length.
You will receive an automatic reply with information on
how to access past files. From then on, you will receive the messages
posted to the E-Drug conference as they are received, and can post
messages to the network.
Unsubscribing
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You may cancel these at any time by sending to:
majordomo@usa.healthnet.org *** (NOT to e-drug):
unsubscribe e-drug
(or unsubscribe e-drug-digest)
Getting archives
----------------
To obtain a listing of postings by date, send to
majordomo@usa.healthnet.org"
"get e-drug CONTENTS" [without the " "]
To obtain an alphabetical listing of all postings made in 1996, type: "get
e-drug TOPICS"
To obtain an individual posting, type: "get e-drug 96MMDDHHMMSS"
as appropriate, using the archive number
How To Post
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To submit a posting for the E-Drug conference, send a message to:
e-drug@usa.healthnet.org (NOT to one of the moderators)
!!! In order to help all our readers evaluate the posts better, please give
your full name, affiliation and country at the end of your post.!!!
If you have no current affiliation to an institution or company, please
write either:
- Health professional
- Non-health professional
- Student or
- Interested lay person
as appropriate.
The country name is needed because some country domain names are not
obvious, and some people are in countries different from their mailing
address.
Contact Information
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All suggestions are welcome! Feedback can be sent to:
owner-e-drug@usa.healthnet.org or directly to:
<73377.3055@compuserve.com>
Wilbert Bannenberg
Wilbert Bannenberg, public health consultant
Box 456
Irene 0062
South Africa
tel/fax home +27-12-6672092 tel work +27-12-3120374/75
fax work +27-12-3244525 email 73377.3055@compuserve.com
--
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For additional assistance, send mail to: `owner-e-drug@usa.healthnet.org'.