Exporting technology to war-torn regions: with the help from a San Francisco State professor, medical-information centers are changing the face of Iraqi medicine

As Dr. Gary Selnow watched California's high-tech boom of the 1990s transform people into millionaires literally overnight, he believed it should mean more than just greenbacks and stock options. So the San Francisco State University professor of communication put that belief into practice. He has improved access to technology and medical knowledge in post-war Iraq in a way that is saving lives daily.

By installing medical-information centers in Iraqi hospitals and medical schools, Selnow and his team of volunteers have introduced doctors, nurses and students to treasure chests of health-care knowledge. New diagnosis methods, surgical techniques and treatment options are now more available to Iraqi physicians. And current drug information is giving pharmacists there a chance to decide what else to stock on their shelves. These are basic health care tenets in the West, but years of international sanctions under Saddam Hussein stifled the flow of information into and out of Iraq.

Without access to the global well of medical knowledge, Iraq's health-care system dried up, much like a human body atrophies if deprived of nutritients and exercise. Selnow's goal is to install 50 medical-information centers. Currently, 19 are operating. A former Air Force pilot, Selnow has made a series of low-profile trips into unstable regions.

Each new medical-information center consists of at least six networked computers and CD-ROMs of the latest journals, databases and tutorials compiled from universities, government, pharmaceutical companies and non-governmental organizations. Whenever the Internet has become locally available, Selnow's team has facilitated access to proprietary medical Web sites.

Only two centers have Internet capabilities so far--a sign of Iraq's poorly developed telecommunications infrastructure.

Selnow has also collaborated with SFSU nursing faculty to design a quick-start training course on CDs and DVDs for Iraqi nurses. Until recently, nurses did little besides change bedpans. Most did not even know how to take a patient's blood pressure. But Iraqi doctors, overwhelmed by the volume of patients and injuries, began recognizing the need to have nurses who were more on par with their Western counterparts and asked Selnow for help. The doctors are now using the training materials to teach nurses.

Selnow recalls a trip to a Baghdad medical complex using the medical-information center. When he asked the director for an example of a difference in diagnosis or treatment that had occurred thanks to the networked computers, the director "told me to go in the hall, ask any doctor and I would get at least a dozen stories from any given day. The databases have given the doctors more information than they've ever seen," Selnow says.

The Iraq project is only Selnow's latest export of information technology to a war-tom country. While giving a lecture about the Internet to schoolchildren in Croatia in 1997-98, Selnow noticed how enthralled they were by online images of the Golden Gate Bridge and other California icons. "The only technology they'd ever seen were weapons. Suddenly, they could reach beyond their village to places where people weren't killing each other."

Selnow subsequently taught computer classes to Croatian and Serbian adults. Word got out in academia and among IT professionals. Selnow was asked to help bring IT to other disadvantaged regions. Similar projects have sprouted in Africa and Latin America. Along the way, he formed a nonprofit organization called WIRED International, dedicated to applying IT to community development, health care and education in developing and post-conflict regions. The establishment of WIRED has allowed him to secure funding from the State Department, the National Institutes of Health and various corporations, foundations and individuals.

Geopolitical instability is a fact of life for such projects, though. WiRED's plan to install 17 more medical-information centers in December 2004 had to be delayed. Widespread pre-election attacks on the population and on government officials made equipment transportation difficult everywhere and impossible in some places. In one incident, a donated computer was destroyed in 2003 after a suicide bomber detonated a truckload of explosives outside the United Nations' headquarters in Baghdad, housed next door to a WIRED building.

However, Selnow remains committed to the cause. "Technology has a real human application. We are making a difference over there."

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