03 February 2010

U.S. Medical Library Offers Free Information for Haiti Relief

National Library of Medicine joins with publishers on access initiative

Dr. Dan Purdom of the Missouri Disaster Medical Assistance Team feeds a Haitian child with an untreated congenital condition.

By Jim Fisher-Thompson
Staff Writer

Washington — Doctors and health care workers battling infection and disease in Haiti since the January 12 earthquake are being aided by an innovative collaboration between the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and medical publishers.

Access to 213 biomedical journals and 69 medical textbooks is available to relief workers in Haiti on the Internet without cost for four weeks through the NLM’s Emergency Access Initiative (EAI), a clearinghouse of information made available through NLM’s MedLine/PubMed digital database.

Launching the initiative on January 25, Donald Lindberg, NLM director, said, “In light of the medical disaster unfolding in Haiti, it’s hard to imagine a more urgent need. We know that Haiti’s medical challenges will continue beyond the immediate emergency needs of the earthquake’s aftermath.”

Sheldon Kotzin, NLM’s associate director for library operations, told America.gov, “We started [EAI] up in early 2009 to address man-made and natural disasters in the United States. It’s really a temporary medical library trying to meet the needs of health professionals dealing with patient care in clinical settings.”

Kotzin explained that while NLM’s PubMed database includes information from more than 5,300 journals, the choice of the journals and books in the EAI offering came about because of a natural disaster in the United States.

After Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, Kotzin said, “we examined all of the requests for journal articles received at the library here and winnowed that down to a small number. At the same time, we asked the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and World Health Organization for titles they would recommend.”

“What we saw with Katrina is that after the first responders got in and did their jobs of search, rescue and emergency medicine, usually in the first few weeks, we began to see them having to deal with the chronic illnesses and infectious diseases that followed the disaster. That’s why we didn’t start EAI on day one” of the Haiti earthquake, he said.

“Basically, we see the EAI as a temporary library for those people treating patients not only on an emergency basis but also for information useful to treat and forestall the outbreak of communicable diseases.”

Participating publishers are: American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American College of Physicians, American Society of Health-Systems Pharmacists, ASM Press, B.C. Decker, BMJ, Elsevier, F.A. Davis, Mary Ann Liebert, Massachusetts Medical Society, McGraw-Hill, Merck Publishing, Oxford University Press, People’s Medical Publishing House, Springer, University of Chicago Press, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer.

The nonfee arrangement with the publishers lasts for four weeks, Kotzin said. “After that, it was decided there would be every opportunity to extend free use upon mutual agreement of the publishers and NLM. We went to the publishers of those journals and asked: ‘Would you be willing to provide free access in times of emergency’ and in most cases they said ‘Yes.’”

The NLM, which is the nation’s largest medical library, is part of the National Institutes of Health — the U.S. medical research agency that comprises 27 medical institutes, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

According to the HHS Web site, HHS medical teams have treated more than 23,200 Haitian earthquake victims, performed 98 surgeries and delivered 28 babies. HHS has about 275 people in Haiti through its Disaster Medical Assistance Team and the International Medical Surgical Response Team operating at temporary medical stations set up in a soccer field near Port-au-Prince.

Other HHS teams are providing primary medical care at Thebaud, at the U.S. Embassy, and at a base in Petionville, in addition to evaluating patients sent aboard the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort off the Haitian coast.

As of January 31, the U.S. government has devoted more than $402 million in disaster assistance to Haiti, including approximately $40 million for health-related programs.