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Dear Rick, This is a follow up in regard to one of the national agencies that I listed in my previous post: "The National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program." Since learning about this new program several months ago, I had been trying to get in touch with a representative of the CDC who is connected with it to learn more about their basic goals ( if you've had a chance to read their "strategy document", you might have concluded the jargon a bit difficult to interpret...a typical example of bureaucratic doublespeak.) I had lofty expectations that this program's ultimate goal and purpose was to function as a central point to which doctors/neurologists would submit background information (toxic exposures, heredity connections,etc.) on current and newly diagnosed Parkinson's patients. I was disappointed, to say the least, when I was informed otherwise. In my conversation with Judy Qualters, an associate director of Science at the CDC, I learned that this is not the direction they are working toward. Their objective will be in electronically coordination/linking the agencies that are now in place. They plan to have the program implemented by 2008. Part of their program will include an informational website for public access. Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed that the program falls so short of my expectations that they were in the process of the development of a national database. In fact, Ms. Qualters seems to question the effectiveness of such a database and outlined the obstacles that would prevent its establishment. Those obstacles being: privacy issues, reliability of accurate input information, the unlikelihood that physicians would desire to participate, etc. She said that the CDC is just now making efforts to implement an electronic consolidation of medical records/information and it will be some time before this will be in force. I am now beginning to doubt the possibility of even a small hope that we will have a database in place in the forseeable future and unless someone has information that shows otherwise, I feel that expectations are not realistic. Dee ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn