E-DRUG: Launch of a new Medicines web site
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The Department of Technical Cooperation for Essential Drugs and Traditional Medicine and the Department of Medicines Policy and Standards are pleased to announce the launch of a new Medicines web site
http://www.who.int/medicines/
The site was developed following a User Survey conducted recently and we have benefited from the active input of colleagues within WHO and from partner organizations. It offers fresh content and includes a number of additional features and information resources. The site is structured according to WHO's activities in the area of medicines, facilitating navigation and generally making it more user-friendly. Key features include:
* Advanced Medicines and WHO site search based on GoogleTM
* An expanded medicines "News and Events" section; and
* Integrated web databases and on-line information retrieval.
The User Survey highlighted a need to make our information more easily accessible. Therefore the "Publications" section on the site now contains a new Medicines Documentation system that has over 400 documents in English, French and Spanish. It covers all key areas of work of the two Departments - including medicines policy, quality and safety, technical cooperation and traditional medicine - and has the following features.
Fully searchable: The content is in HTML format, which allows advanced searches across the entire collection, e.g. a search for the medicine name 'abacavir' would produce not just a 'hit list' of document titles in which this term occurs, but would highlight all occurrences within the text.
Multilingual: Documents are available in English, French and Spanish. When other language versions of a document exist, these are indicated by language icons. Clicking on the icon for a language takes the user directly to the same document in language specified.
Different file formats: In addition to HTML files, PDF versions of documents have also been included and can be accessed by clicking the icon. Alternatively, the 'Export to PDF' feature can be used to create PDF files.
Content for courses or reports: The "e-Course builder" feature enables the compilation of an html-based document containing a selection of chapters or sections from any number of documents in the system. Once compiled, this document can be further edited or adapted as required.
Other important resources available on the site are:
* Antimicrobial Drug resistance http://www.who.int/drugresistance/
* Essential Medicines Library http://mednet3.who.int/emEMLlib/
* Prequalification of Medicines http://mednet3.who.int/prequal/
* MedNet services for Global Indicators (GlobInd) and International Nonproprietary names (INN) http://mednet.who.int/
* WHO Drug Information http://www.who.int/druginformation/
Kind regards
Jörg Hetzke (MIS) & Lalit Dwivedi (Publications)
Health Technology & Pharmaceuticals
World Health Organization
20, avenue Appia -- 1211 Genève 27
Switzerland
web: http://www.who.int/medicines
mednet: http://mednet.who.int