dear E-drug and INDICES readers,
E-drug is nearing the 1000 participants from 82 countries, and traffic is
becoming bigger. E-drug was set up as an offline email conference to allow
health professionals and essential drug programme managers to exchange
interesting news, messages, questions and answers, and discussions on
essential drugs issues. E-drug has no formal organisation; it has five
volunteers who act as moderators. If people are interested to help, they
are most welcome! Moderators will typically spend 30-60 minutes per day.
INDICES is the electronic conference of the International Network of Drug
Information Centres. It has as objective to discuss issues around the
organisation of drug information centres (setup, funding, management,
quality etc), the promotion of objective drug information, as well as
technical questions on drugs that cannot be resolved by standard textbooks.
It currently has 132 participants from some 30 countries, and traffic is
lower than E-drug. There is a volunteer moderator (Leesette Turner,
currently on maternity leave) and an interim-moderator.
The E-drug and INDICES moderators are proposing to re-arrange the
discussions over the two discussion groups, so that the identity of both
discussion groups becomes clearer. We have the following proposal to split
the discussions over E-drug and INDICES:
---
The following messages should be sent to E-DRUG
(email to e-drug@usa.healthnet.org):
- news, debate, questions on all aspects of ESSENTIAL DRUG PROGRAMMES and
PHARMACEUTICAL POLICIES (such as National Drug Policies, procurement
strategies, selection, distribution, rational use interventions, cost etc)
- technical questions on ESSENTIAL drugs with a GENERAL public health
interest (e.g., treatment guidelines, new evidence etc)
-----
The following messages should be sent to INDICES
(email to indices@usa.healthnet.org)
- news, debate, questions on all aspects of DRUG INFORMATION CENTRES
- questions on NON-ESSENTIAL drugs
- questions on ESSENTIAL drugs with only LIMITED interest for general
public health (eg, use in rare combinations, special cases)
- what is the generic content of this foreign BRANDNAME?
---
We hope that the proposed split will help us balancing the two conferences
better. Some people might want to subscribe to both conferences.
For E-druggers who want to subscribe to INDICES, send a message to
majordomo@usa.healthnet.org
with in the body of text:
SUBSCRIBE INDICES <your email address>
END
(If you want to unsubscribe, replace SUBSCRIBE with UNSUBSCRIBE)
We would also ask all E-druggers to ensure that their national/local Drug
Info Centres are subscribed to INDICES. This will enable INDICES to become
the leading global discussion group on drug info matters, like E-drug is
for essential drug programmes.
E-drug and INDICES will remain a free service of SatelLife/Healthnet.
But you will probably realize that some core funding is needed for them to
continue providing this service. Anyone with funding ideas is welcome to
email Leela McCullough of SatelLife at email: leela@usa.healthnet.org
Comments/proposals for improvement of the lists and moderation are also
very welcome to the moderators.
On behalf of the E-drug and INDICES moderators,
kind regards and happy emailing!
Wilbert Bannenberg
interim moderator INDICES
co-moderator E-drug
Email: WilbertBannenberg@compuserve.com
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