most downloaded resource on our university server, as it was one of the only web-accessible sources of information on this topic in the world at the time, and was more current than the other offerings. As a result of the almost overwhelming interest — we were regularly fielding phone calls from U.S. newspapers asking for “Dr.” Jacobson — and because one of the only other electronic sources of information on the outbreak was the then-new ProMED Mail, I started an Ebola information page, which survives to this day (www.mcb.uct.ac.za//ebola/ebopage.htm). The page was basically an aggregator of all the material I could dredge up on a daily basis from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ProMED, and newspapers and magazines, at first relevant only to the Kikwit outbreak, but later to Ebola and other HFVs in general as the outbreak died away. It attracted a lot of attention as a primary information source, helped by its being highlighted in New Scientist’s Netropolitan column, and is still listed in many places as such. I commented in late 1995 on the aftermath of the web frenzy, in an essay I wrote for a UCT alumnus publication, also HTMLised for my site, entitled: “The Student, the Web and the Ebola Connection, or: ‘Dr Jacobson, are you going to Kikwit?’” (www.mcb.uct.ac.za/Staff/Ed/Ebola/ebolali.html), where I wrote the following: The whole phenomenon has been an object exercise in the power of the Web as a tool for the wide dissemination of information: we reached not only professional virologists, but also healthcare professionals, and — most importantly — the lay public on a large scale. Dr FA Murphy of the Veterinary Faculty at U California Davis — speaking on emerging diseases at the recent Vth International ICVO Virology Congress in Midrand — used slides of our site and of the David Ornstein site in the US as examples of how archives on the Web and on the Internet run by non-specialist and/or non-medical people could be invaluable means of quickly and widely disseminating important information to a lay public. I was sufficiently impressed by the whole exercise that I wrote an essay entitled “The Internet as an Educational Tool: Making the Web Work for South Africa” (www.mcb.uct.ac.za/Staff/Ed/educwww. html), for a then print (!) and now electronic magazine called OnTheInternet (www.isoc.org/oti), published by the Internet Society. Therein I made this brave comment: The fact that the tutorial and related material are on the Web means, of course, that they can be accessed from all over the country and in fact the world — and therein lies the value
189