MedlinePlus Health Topic on Swine Flu
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/swineflu.html

Environmental Health and Toxicology Links on Swine Flu
http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/swineflu.html
The National Library of Medicine Division of Specialized Information Services has released an Enviro-Health Links page on Swine Flu. This page contains links to resources about the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak, including transmission, prevention, treatment, and the genetic makeup of the influenza virus. [scb]

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) announced today the completion of the first phase of an online finding aid/scanning project to provide information about and access to NLM’s 2,000+ linear foot archival collection of the FDA Notice of Judgment files.  This project provides for managing scans of and extracting metadata from some 70,000 Notices of Judgments in court cases about violations of the Pure Food and Drug acts; this release provides access to some 6,800 scanned notices related to drugs and devices, with the balance to follow.  In addition to providing information about the cases, the database serves as a locator for the archival materials upon which the cases were made, which provide extensive information about the commerce of health care in the first half of the twentieth century. The project may be found at http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/fdanj. [da]

MedlinePlus has a new tutorial (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/medicalwords/) on understanding medical words or terminology. Sometimes the terms we use to describe an illness or condition do not match those of a doctor. For example, a “heart attack” to a doctor means there is damage to the heart muscle, while a consumer might interpret it to mean the heart isn’t beating. You’ll also learn how to make sense of medical terms by breaking the term into parts and examining the word roots. For instance, the term colostomy (creating an opening in the colon) looks like this when broken up: colo=colon, +ostomy=opening of. The tutorial takes around 15-20 minutes to complete, including a few short quizzes. [da]

See this consumer level tutorial from NLM that teaches how to put together parts of medical words. The tutorial is interactive with quizzes to see what was learned http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/medicalwords.html [scb]

The mission of NLM’s National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR) is “improving the collection, storage, analysis, retrieval, and dissemination of health services research.” See their section on Outreach and Training, which includes E-learning courses, Health Services Research core library collections, and Health Services Research history. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/outreach.html scb

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/mplus_mag_spanish09.html
There’s a new magazine for people who want health information in Spanish. The National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, and the Friends of the National Library of Medicine recently launched NIH MedlinePlus Salud http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/spanish/magazine/. The magazine is produced in partnership with the National Alliance for Hispanic Health.

The new publication, written in both English and Spanish, complements NIH MedlinePlus magazine http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/magazine/ which premiered in 2006. Salud (the Spanish word for health) was created to bring quality health information to even more people, and to address the specific health needs of the growing Hispanic population. [scb]