Dear E-drug, E-med and E-lek subscribers,
Our servers were unfortunately infected with ransomware in January 2023, and we could no longer access our servers after 3 February 2023. This meant you could not submit or receive any new messages. Unfortunately we could also not inform you about the problem.
Thanks to the support of volunteer IT experts (thanks Craig and Kim!) we finally managed to rescue the backups of nearly all E-drug, E-med and E-lek messages since 1995, and also the list of all 9000 subscribers. This process took a few months.
Several organisations and E-druggers offered help, and in May 2023, E-drug moderators had a meeting with Management Sciences for Health (MSH) in Washington to discuss our options of reviving E-drug. We agreed that E-drug is an important and valuable contribution to promote access to, and appropriate use of, essential medicines worldwide. We decided to restart E-drug 2.0.
MSH kindly offered a small grant to start up a new platform, and run it for 2 years. We decided that the old software was unsafe, and have chosen the online Discourse.org platform: Discourse New User Guide - users - Discourse Meta
E-drug, E-med and E-lek are now integrated in the E-Drug Plus platform. You are now able to submit new messages, receive daily or weekly digests or search all messages at https://talk.edrugplus.org/
After registering in E-Drug Plus, you have access to all 3 language versions: English E-drug, French E-med and Russian E-lek. Look up the categories menu, and select your preference: https://talk.edrugplus.org/categories
After reading new posts or searching for the archives (use search button right upper corner; they go back to 1995!) you may be tempted to start a new post.
You can start a new topic online (hit the +new topic button), or send an email (from your subscribed account!) to e-drug@healthnet.org as before. Please include a signature with your name, affiliation and country.
Francophone users can write to e-med@healthnet.org, and Russian language users to e-lek@healthnet.org
Your message will be moderated by volunteers. We do this to maintain focus on the topic of access to essential medicines, and to maintain quality and etiquette.
How is E-Drug Plus managed?
We decided to establish a legal entity, as that is needed to solicit funding and be sustainable in the future. Thus the ‘E-Drug Foundation’ has been created as a non-profit, public good foundation under Dutch law. It is governed by a temporary Board, who will develop a strategic plan, a budget, and a fundraising plan. These will in future be made available at https://www.e-drug.org
The E-Drug Foundation will also have an international Advisory Board to support the Governing Board, and will create some technical committees (fundraising, IT, webinar and external activities).
If you are interested and willing to help, please send an email to: board@e-drug.org If you have IT expertise, and want to assist with our new platform, please write to IT@e-drug.org
E-drug, E-med and E-lek have run 28 years with volunteer moderators. This has helped to maintain good quality, reliable information, and avoid spam and unprofessional exchanges. A big thank you to Beverley, Kirsten, Richard, Carinne and Lilya! They however need additional colleagues, willing to assist in making E-Drug Plus a success. Please send your interest to moderators@e-drug.org
We will also try to make the Spanish archives of E-farmacos available online. If someone wants to volunteer moderating E-farmacos messages in Spanish, please write to contact@e-drug.org
How do we finance E-Drug Plus?
E-drug has run 25 years without a budget, thanks to the support of friendly NGOs, such as Healthnet, SatelLife, Academy for Educational Development (AED) and finally FHI360. Since 2021, we had no institutional support, and thus needed to fundraise for running the servers. We received 101 donations from E-druggers and friendly organiisations with a total value of more than €5500.
THANK YOU ALL who supported E-drug!
There is currently €299 left for the transition to E-Drug Plus. We appreciate your voluntary donations at our Paypal account: PayPal.Me
If you bank in Europe or a SEPA country, you can send Euros to IBAN: NL28ABNA0128039183. BIC: ABNANL2A; Name of account: Stichting E-Drug.
On behalf of the E-drug Foundation Board, moderators and supporters of E-Drug Plus, I welcome you to the new system!
Wilbert Bannenberg, founder and chairperson of the E-Drug Foundation