Satellite Links Third-World Health Officials

Last year, Mozambique’s medical establishment wrote to the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Brazil seeking help in rebuilding a health care network ravaged by civil war. The letter took seven months to reach the Brazilians.

Now, thanks to a low-orbiting satellite that “talks” to the Internet, doctors divided by an ocean but united by the Portuguese language are in contact almost daily.

The story is told by Charles Clements, executive director of the nonprofit Cambridge, Mass., group that launched the satellite just over a year ago and coordinates the Healthnet message-relay service.

“I was at the office of the disease control officer in Zimbabwe a year ago and there was an outbreak of cholera on the border with Mozambique, but he couldn’t call his counterpart in Mozambique,” says Clements. “Now, with Healthnet, they can communicate.”

Affordable and reliable communications are extremely difficult to come by in much of the developing world.

It often is impossible, for example, to phone or send a telex between certain African countries.

Third World health professionals also can find the cost of phoning or faxing U.N. and U.S. health agencies prohibitive.

That’s where SatelLife comes in. Its $1 million satellite uses the Internet to send and receive data by radio transmission, dramatically cheaper than the satellites transmitting telephone and television signals.

Required on the ground are $7,500 worth of computer and radio equipment.

“The number of doctors taking advantage of the service is somewhere in the hundreds,” says Clements. “We’re just beginning to get the stations up.”

A second satellite is slated to go up this year, and SatelLife soon will begin establishing ground stations in Latin America and parts of Asia, he says.