Untangling the Web of Online Information

Type the phrase “travel health” into one Internet search engine and you’ll get 3.5 million hits. Besides reliable sources, such as the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the search brings up Web sites run by individuals or pitchmen with products to sell. So how can you know which sites to trust?

For answers, I turned to Dr. Phyllis Kozarsky, chief of travelers’ health for the CDC, and Dr. David Freedman, professor of medicine and epidemiology/international health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

With another travel medicine expert, Dr. Jay Keystone, an internist and professor at the University of Toronto and the Toronto Hospital and a past president of the International Society of Travel Medicine, they recently scoured the Web looking for reliable travel health information and published their findings in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. They noted that each had been a consultant to one or more of the Internet sites mentioned.

Among their votes for the most reliable travel health information:

* Travelers’ health information on the CDC site, www.cdc.gov, includes the new interactive “Yellow Book,” the CDC’s bible of health information for international travel, with immunization guidelines, disease data and other facts. (Its formal title is “Health Information for International Travel,” and it is reissued every two years.)

The current online edition, for 2001-02, is a big improvement from the cumbersome previous online versions. Now travel medicine experts--as well as the legions of consumers who refer to the book--can access specific information quickly, thanks to drop-down menus for all the major subjects. Want to know which vaccines you need for a specific country? Just choose “vaccination information.”

* The World Health Organization’s site, www.who.int, includes malaria risk by country plus general travel advice, with maps showing the locations of infectious disease outbreaks. (To find them, scroll to “Traveller’s health,” then click on “Full story,” then “Disease maps.”) There’s a section on outbreaks and an archive by year and by disease.

* Health Canada’s Travel Medicine Program site, www.hc-sc.gc.ca /hpb/lcdc/osh/tmpe.html, includes antimalarial recommendations, outbreak information, immunization recommendations and travelers’ health advisories. It’s meant for Canadians but has much information of use to U.S. residents too.

These sites, meant more for the traveling public than for travel medicine experts, also got a nod of approval:

* Travelhealth Online, at www.tripprep.com, has data on subjects as diverse as altitude sickness and yellow fever. Freedman, among other travel medicine consultants, has helped the site develop its information. It lists travel medicine specialists but says it cannot vouch for their credentials. (But neither do two other sites that list such experts--the International Society of Travel Medicine, www.istm.org, and the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, www.astmh.org.)

* Fit for Travel at www.fit-for-travel.de/en/index.html, run by the University of Munich Tropical Institute, has information on vaccinations and malaria and news updates on topics such as recent disease outbreaks.

* Lonely Planet Health, www.lonelyplanet.com/health, run by the guidebook publishers, has sections on predeparture planning, keeping healthy while traveling and women’s health, along with a host of links.

* Medicine Planet, at www.medicineplanet.com, offers its mobile health information services for $4.95 a month, providing access to medical professionals and referrals when needed, but it also posts information that travelers can access for free. For instance, there’s a medicine name translator: Plug in the name of your prescription medicine and the country you’ll be visiting, and it finds the brand name of the drug at your destination.

Freedman advises travelers generally to avoid travel medicine Web sites run by individuals. He says the information is more likely to be inaccurate than information posted by a larger site that has more personnel, and that a smaller site is less likely to update information quickly.

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Healthy Traveler appears twice a month. The writer can be reached at kathleendoheny@earthlink.net.