Global access to infectious disease information

About one half of all deaths in poor countries are caused by infectious diseases. Improving access to infectious disease information is one of the small steps needed to address this injustice. Because the world has shrunk into a global village, infectious diseases are no longer confined by geographical boundaries. Better decision support is needed, not only in developing countries, but also for diagnosing emerging infectious diseases that threaten people throughout the world. In the twenty-first century, we now have new tools for indexing infectious disease information (the relational database) and for disseminating that information worldwide (the Internet). A book such as the Control of Communicable Diseases Manual has a helpful index, but it does not have an electronic index that can provide users with the powerful queries of a relational database. The author has designed a database that uses queries to find all infectious diseases that match one or more search criteria. The database covers 275 communicable diseases and contains 119 signs & symptoms, 39 epidemiological factors, and 16 regions of the world. An example of a query is to search for all diseases that that match the job "veterinarian" and the syndrome "Acute Neurological Plus Fever." The search criteria are the indexes that were built into the tables at the beginning of the project, not the ambiguous and unsystematized indexes that are added at the end of a book. Each disease profile shows initial symptoms, incubation period, common findings, endemic areas, laboratory diagnostics, and epidemiological factors. Epidemiological factors include entry (e.g., ingestion), source (e.g., soil), vector (e.g., ticks), and reservoir (e.g., cats). In conclusion, all useful infectious disease information can be collected and indexed into a web-based relational database to help practitioners quickly build up-to-date differential diagnoses and find detailed information.