The Rest of the Story

The medical information industry is involved, too.  There is an open source project named WorldVistA, which is refining an Linux-based medical records system.  This is based upon a system originally developed by the US Veteran's Affairs hospitals. 

Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, a Healthcare Information System (HIS). VistA is widely believed to be the largest integrated HIS in the world. It was originally developed and maintained by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), based on the systems software architecture and implementation methodology developed by the U.S. Public Health Service jointly with the National Bureau of Standards. It is designed to provide a high-quality medical care environment for the country's military veterans. VistA has a proven track record of supporting a large variety of clinical settings and medical delivery systems.

VistA is in production today at hundreds of healthcare facilities across the country from small outpatient clinics to large medical centers. The software is currently used by the Indian Health Service and a number of other healthcare organizations around the world.

Donate to WorldVistA

Many scientific journals are available free online to scholars in developing countries.  Examples include the ten journals published by the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and many others.  The Public Library of Science just published their first online medical journal, which is completely open-access. 

In addition, there is a site that offers free full-text access to many medical books.  It's called FreeBooks4Doctors, but is open to anyone.  I noticed, though, that not all the links are kept up-to-date.  For example, the link to:

John F. Greden, Editor
Treatment of Recurrent Depression
Review of Psychiatry, Volume 20, Number 5
2001 - American Psychiatric Press, Inc., 189 pp; 2.6 MByte
ISBN 1-58562-025-4

is broken; the correct link is here.  Parenthetically, Dr. Greden is the Chair of the Dept. of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan. 

George H.W. Bush popularized the phrase, "a thousand points of light."  This stood for a conservative political philosophy that meant that the government should not be involved in so many social programs.  The ideas is that if the government does not do it, nongovernmental organizations will spring up to do the same job, without taxpayer funding.  It is a nice idea, and it might even work.  The development of open-source software, and medical information, illustrates this nicely.  But the concept of "a thousand points of light" will work only if, and this is a big if, the government does not actively get in the way.  For example, in Iraq, the US government could let the people form farming cooperatives.  Instead, they put legislation in place (1-article 2-copy of law) that prevents farmers from saving their seeds.  This, essentially, puts American agribusiness is the place of a social function that could be served by local cooperatives:

In 2002, FAO estimated that 97 percent of Iraqi farmers used saved seed from their own stocks from last year's harvest or purchased from local markets. When the new law - on plant variety protection (PVP) - is put into effect, seed saving will be illegal and the market will only offer proprietary "PVP-protected" planting material "invented" by transnational agribusiness corporations. The new law totally ignores all the contributions Iraqi farmers have made to development of important crops like wheat, barley, date and pulses. Its consequences are the loss of farmers' freedoms and a grave threat to food sovereignty in Iraq. In this way, the US has declared a new war against the Iraqi farmer.

George W. Bush has takes his father's idea, corrupted it, and turned into A Thousand Points of Profit.

OK, I promised an optimistic article.  It turned out to be not so optimistic.