Dear E-DRUG friends,
In the past year or so we have seen many people subscribing to E-DRUG
and we have now well above 200 subscribers.
One suggestion we recently received was to publish information on E-DRUG
regularly on the network, to allow subscribers to distribute it to
colleagues and friends who do not yet know about the network. As you
know, E-DRUG is a free service for, and by professionals working in
the field of essential drugs. We would like to have as many people as
possible to join the network.
Below we present the most recent information on E-DRUG, with the
request to forward it to anyone you think could benefit from becoming
a subscriber.
Hilbrand Haak <102347.1567@compuserve.com>
Wilbert Bannenberg <wilbertb@xs4all.nl> or <73377.3055@compuserve.com>
moderators E-DRUG
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INVITATION TO JOIN E-DRUG, THE FIRST CONFERENCE IN THE
INTERNET ON THE CONCEPTS OF ESSENTIAL DRUGS
Dear colleagues,
We would like to invite you to join the E-Drug conference. "E-DRUG"
has been running for almost a year now and over 200 professionals
have subscribed.
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. Many have
already discovered the usefulness of e-mail as an affordable tool for
communication. E-DRUG is a free service, provided by the organization
HEALTHNET in Boston, USA. No costs are involved, and you can
subscribe / unsubscribe at any time. Technical info how to join follows
below. You are kindly invited to share this information with anyone
who may benefit from becoming a subscriber.
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 e-mail messages.
If you can read this message, you can also join the E-DRUG conference.
E-DRUG can be used in the following ways:
- To send a question to all members (e.g., requesting suggestions as
how to lobby Parliament or the Medical Association on the introduction
of the Essential Drug List concept etc.);
- Informing members about upcoming conferences or courses, or to report
on conference proceedings;
- By requesting a list of available files at E-DRUG. One of these files
is the latest update of the "Who is where on e-mail in essential drugs"
list of e-mail addresses (version 0.29, April 1996).
- Inform all members about the availability of a new document,
Essential Drugs 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;
- Publicly available information sources (e.g., WHO/DAP publications,
the WHO Model List of Essential Drugs, the UNIPAC Essential Drug
price list, articles from the Essential Drug Monitor or INRUD News)
could be made available as downloadable files. It requires cooperation
of these e-mail users, however, to make these texts actually available.
They can be submitted as pure ASCII files to the undersigned.
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 is a moderated conference. This means that a moderator filters
out all messages with "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" (which should be
sent to majordomo@usa.healthnet.org, and NOT to e-drug@usa.healthnet.org),
and that other submissions may be screened
for appropriateness and edited (to remove unnecessary information).
This process may slightly delay the multiplication of the message(s) to
all subscribers, but enhances the quality of the network. This is
especially important for those subscribers who log-on via expensive
international phone connections.
It is strongly suggested that everyone who sends a request for
information to E-DRUG and receives responses, will write a short
summary of the responses to the entire list after an appropriate period
of time.
E-DRUG operates in the english language, but a similar system in
spanish (MEDICAM-E) or french (E-MED) may be created if there is
enough interest.
Suggestions on improvements are always welcome! Feedback can be
sent to E-DRUG directly, or to <wilbertb@xs4all.nl>,