One afternoon in a noisy hallway as classes were changing at Makerere’s School of Medicine in Kampala, Uganda, I showed eager students NLM’s popular MedlinePlus website. They were especially engaged by the interactive tutorials. Why not create tutorials for diseases in Africa? Malaria and diarrhea ere the obvious first choices based on the list of disease priorities from our advisory panel of African scientists and clinicians at the beginning of MIMCom.
Uganda and had strong working relationships with their elders: the Dean of Makerere University’s School of Medicine as well as the Head of the Albert Cook Medical Library. The idea could grow from here.
We brought together the students and their faculty advisors with Ugandan artists, actors, and translators to create tutorials on malaria and diarrhea. When they were ready to go online and become part of the MedlinePlus database, NLM’s MedlinePlus team back in Bethesda was ready to collaborate.

This effort began as an "information intervention" in Mifumi village in Eastern Uganda. The village and its Health Center became part of the Community Based Education and Service Program (COBES) of the medical school at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

NLM worked with the students and the nurse sister at the health center to carry out a baseline survey on knowledge about malaria; implement the MedlinePlus malaria tutorial in several media and local languages; and, in collaboration with Ugandan health informatics experts, conduct a study in actual use of bednets, employing a digital pen application for collecting data.

This last project concluded with a community meeting in which the students presented their research findings back to the village. Over 150 people came and stayed for two hours.

This work in Mifumi village has inspired expansion into other tutorials designed to help both health professionals and communities deal with local health problems, including mental health in war-torn Northern Uganda, tuberculosis, diarrhea, and Burkitt's Lymphoma, the latter in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute.