How a blue trunk packed with carefully chosen medical texts is helping to save lives around the world.

COURTESY OF PLOS

For most of us, access to the Internet—and all it has to offer from email to online bill paying to commercial databases—is just a click a few clicks away. But there are still plenty of places in the world that don’t have dialup, let alone broadband or T1 lines or even electricity for that matter. With each passing nanosecond, it seems, the information gap gets wider and wider.

Nowhere is that chasm more harmful than in the healthcare field. And yet, people who need medical attention can’t afford to wait until computers and cell towers and all the other necessary technological infrastructure are put into place to help doctors and nurses learn about new standards of care.

Enter some clear-thinking medical staffers from the West African nation of Guinea, who in the late 1990s told the local office of the World Health Organization that what they could use more than anything else at the moment was a portable library to help nurses and physicians keep their training up to date. A group of librarians associated with the W. H. O. did the requisite research and assembled a comprehensive, yet manageable set of about 150 handbooks and manuals and arranged them in a good-sized blue trunk. The French language version, for example contains Médecine Tropicale by Marc Gentilini while the English version includes the Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine.

The resulting Blue Trunk Libraries were such a hit in Guinea that soon other countries and organizations started clamoring for them. To date, according to an article published yesterday in the Public Library of Science: Medicine, the World Health Organization has distributed 1488 Blue Trunk Libraries around the globe—about 850 of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Each Library costs $2,000 in all—that includes training users—plus $600 to $700 or so for shipping.

A Spanish version shouldn’t take too long to pull together but the Blue Trunk team is having trouble assembling a Portuguese version. (Translating all the medical books is turning out to be way too daunting a task, even for the W. H. O.). Who knows? Maybe there are some tropical medicine specialists in Brazil who would be willing to help them out?

Anyway, it all sounds pretty good in theory—although that $2,000 price tag seems pretty steep, even with additional training.

Read an updated post (March 9, 2006) with a response from the Chief Librarian of the W.H.O. Regional Office for Africa in Brazzaville here.

—Christine Gorman