The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Trying to Get Well With Veronica
I’m writing this from bed, peering at my computer screen through bleary eyes and hoping I can keep from coughing while accessing the hard drive of the machine sitting on my stomach.
Two weeks ago, during an ill-fated journey East, my wife and I came down with colds so miserable--and so tenacious--that we’ve begun to dignify our suffering with the term flu.
We are far from alone, it seems: In New York, for instance, the entire city seemed stricken. Friends to whom we’d given theater tickets that we were too sick to use reported that the audience sounded like a 19th-Century tubercular ward.
My wife, a medical person, called her doctor when we got home, but wary of such high-priced witchcraft, I decided to stick with the devil I know. I headed for the Internet.
I wanted to learn what the experts recommend for a bad cold or flu. I also wanted to see if I was correct in my impression that the media pays too little attention to an ailment that affects the population en masse, seriously impinges on productivity and no doubt even kills.
It was an ideal opportunity to use one of my favorite Internet research tools, Veronica. The name stands for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-Wide Index to Computerized Archives. The rodent here is gopher, the easy-to-use hierarchical menu system for finding things on the Internet. Basically, Veronica is a feature of gopher that will search the menus on hundreds of Internet gopher sites for a search term you specify.
Veronica is extremely simple: You just log on and type gopher at the prompt. This gets you a menu that either offers Veronica on the spot or offers “other gophers servers” or some such, which will in turn offer Veronica. I assumed that searching “cold” would get me an avalanche of stuff on the North Pole, so the search term I chose was “flu.”
It took a couple of minutes--it is best to use Veronica after hours, as it is often busy--but the results, when they appeared, were impressive: a customized menu five screens long of gopher items mentioning “flu,” all thanks to the Veronica server at the University of Pisa, which for some reason was the one to which my Internet provider defaulted.
Some of the items seem on their faces to be of limited usefulness. “Demonstration of Cowdria ruminantium in Amblyomma hebraeum by flu” turns out to be from a Dutch veterinary journal, for example. Nor are we likely to glean much from the menu item “APF-1, RAYBESTOS SUPER HEAVY DUTY BRAKE FLU.”
Don’t be discouraged, though. There is gold amid the dross. From a 1993 University of Virginia news release about a study of the effectiveness of flu shots, we learn that flu-related illnesses kill 10,000 to 40,000 Americans annually, 85% of them elderly. At my advanced age, I’d better be careful. But at least this confirms my notion that the flu gets too little attention in the media.
Veronica also delivered the goods when it comes to influenza etiology and treatment. A directory at the University of Chicago gave as thorough a description as you could want of symptoms and treatment, how flu spreads, and so forth. A Rice University student information posting suggested that “Studies have shown that 500 mg. of Vitamin C taken every 4 to 6 hours may shorten the course of a cold by 36 to 48 hours. Vitamin C has a mild antihistamine effect that will not cause excessive drying.”
The Rice material also suggested that “amantadine, an antiviral drug, can be useful in the treatment of influenza but needs to be started within the first 24 hours to be effective.”
Too late for me. Several other items talked about breakthrough drugs, including one eye-catcher from Australia: Flu cure in sight Scientists at Monash University’s Victorian College of Pharmacy and the CSIRO have synthesized a potent new drug that may cure and prevent influenza. The drug has already been tested successfully on ferrets, a species highly susceptible to human influenza viruses.
I e-mailed the author of this 1993 posting, so far to no avail. But at least I know where it came from.
Like so much of what is found on the Internet, a lot of the material on “flu” seemed to be useful and informative but was of doubtful provenance. Things are very often unlabeled and undated, and you kind of have to judge them by what they say and how they fit in with other things you read--there is plenty of misinformation floating around. Caveat emptor, in other words.
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On the other hand, if you can’t tell exactly where a document comes from, you can tell where it lives. To find out where any given gopher menu item resides, just put the cursor on it and hit the = sign; gopher will give you the answer.
Along these lines, it’s wise when using Veronica to use gopher’s bookmark feature. This lets you add menu items--or entire Veronica searches--to your own personal gopher menu. Use gopher help to find out how to use bookmarks.
Sometimes the old-fashioned remedies are best. Using Veronica once again, I ferreted out what was portrayed as the perfect chicken soup recipe. Unfortunately, it was a newsgroup posting so old that it was no longer available. Rats. I did find a poem called “Chicken Soup,” but it didn’t make me feel much better.
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Daniel Akst, a Los Angeles writer, is a former assistant business editor for technology at The Times. He welcomes messages at akstd@news.latimes.com but regrets that he cannot reply to each and every one.
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Health On-Line
The three major commercial on-line services offer lots of health-oriented material.
* On CompuServe, try Health-Net. It provides clear, knowledgeable articles on a wide range of medical concerns and ailments, and is part of CompuServe’s basic service. If you can spend a few dollars, CompuServe’s Health Database Plus offers a huge array of medical articles for $1.50 each. And the Government Giveaways Forum--GO INFOUSA--has a health library full of “references, clearinghouses, networks, publications and videos for over 1,500 diseases and health issues.”
* On Prodigy, jump health news for health-related materials, including advice from Consumer Reports. Prodigy also has a health bulletin board.
* On America Online, use the keyword health. The Better Health and Medical Forum includes information on diseases and treatments, and staying well through exercise, good eating and healthy habits.
