Book Review

Infectious Diseases Library

N Engl J Med 1997; 337:1701-1702December 4, 1997

Article

Infectious Diseases Library
CD-ROM with manual. Version 2.0. By Gerald L. Mandell. System needed: Multimedia IBM PC or compatible computer with 4 MB of RAM. (Also available for Macintosh Systems 7.0 or higher with 4 MB of RAM.) New York, Churchill Livingstone, 1997. $395. ISBN: 0-443-07931-5

Chapters devoted to infectious diseases are an integral part of every specialty textbook, but one may occasionally wish to consult a more comprehensive source. Mandell's Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases is such a source. The AIDS pandemic has refocused our attention on many bizarre infectious agents. Contrary to previous forecasts, the relative contributions of infectious agents in the differential diagnosis of many common conditions seem to have increased steadily during the past decade.

This CD-ROM contains the entire contents of the 2803-page fourth edition of Mandell's Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, with all its tables and figures. This version includes two additional works linked to the textbook. The first, Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases Antimicrobial Therapy 1996/1997, is a concise and highly practical data base of therapies. The second is a collection of almost 70,000 Medline abstracts from leading journals in the field of infectious diseases, spanning the five-year period 1990–1995. These abstracts are hyperlinked to citations within the text so that when you click on a highlighted bibliographical reference, the full abstract is displayed. Although not all textbook references are included in the Medline data base, this utility provides full coverage of abstracts in these journals regardless of whether they are cited in the text.

The excellent search engine, Folio Infobase, provides sophisticated searching tools that use standard query options. For example, cross-matching cytomegalovirus and ganciclovir resulted in 40 hits, indicating the wealth of clinically useful information found in this source. When searching for mycoplasma and heart, we found that although some of the 12 hits were irrelevant, mycoplasma is associated with myocarditis, mediastinitis that develops after heart transplantation, and wound infections as well as with infective endocarditis. This search proved to be an efficient preliminary step before doing a full Medline search of the literature. Needless to say, a similar procedure would be impossible with the printed version of the book.

Besides these search options, one is offered additional features, such as the ability to add notes and bookmarks and to highlight text. A minor drawback that is common to all electronic textbooks, including this one, is the lack of page numbering. This omission may become problematic when one wishes to cite this source in a manuscript.

In conclusion, we highly recommend the use of this comprehensive resource for routine clinical care of patients, and we recommend it even more highly in academic settings. However, the relatively high price tag might put off many potential users.

Daniel Mimouni, M.D.
Beilinson Medical Center, Petah-Tiqva, 49100 Israel

Eytan Z. Blumenthal, M.D.
Hadassah University Hospital, Jerusalem, 91120 Israel