If this site were an academic paper or textbook, I would have sprinkled references to my sources through my Web pages as I wrote them. Since I am writing mainly for non-medical people here, I have omitted many or most specific references to where the information I give comes from. (And besides, a certain amount of the information I give is based on my own experience as a practicing pediatrician; we all accumulate this kind of knowledge in our practices, but we don't necessarily publish it all.)
Much of this information I present here comes from standard textbooks of
pediatrics, which try to cover all aspects of general pediatrics. (Needless
to say, these textbooks are often thicker than telephone books...) Three
of these textbooks are:
Another major source I use is UpToDate. This is an electronic textbook of medicine which covers several specialties, including pediatrics. The textbook only exists online, and is updated continuously by its contributing authors. UpToDate has an extensive section for patients as well.
Other sources include textbooks that I myself have contributed to. These include:
Much of the information on infections and immunizations is taken from the
Another important source of information on infections is the Web site maintained by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC is the United States' main resource on diseases and their causes and prevention, and investigates virtually every new disease appearing in the US and many outbreaks elsewhere in the world in cooperation with the World Health Organization and local public health authorities. A good example of this cooperation is the joint investigation by the CDC, the WHO, and Hong Kong authorities of the 1997-1998 Hong Kong "bird flu" epidemic. The CDC Web site is updated frequently, and you should consult it for the latest information on infectious diseases. (I do!)
This Web site is meant to operate with just about any available Web browser. For this reason, most of it is written in HTML version 1.0-2.0 compliant HTML using as few "bells-and-whistles" as possible. The main page and those topic pages that contain calculators use Javascript, and the CT scan (not Cat Scan -- and certainly not Sniff) simulation runs inside a Java applet. Otherwise there are no client-side scripts on this site, no frames are used, and even tables are used rarely. I have tested most of the documents here using the following browsers:
If you are having problems displaying this site on your browser, please let me know using the feedback channel.
The internal search engine is SWISH-E (the Simple Web Indexing System for Humans, Enhanced), developed by Kevin Hughes, formerly with EIT (which no longer exists). SWISH-E is available from the SunSITE at the University of California, Berkeley. The CGI interface I use to access the SWISH index is Ron Clark's Swish-Web gateway.