GIDEON ebooks series review by Dr. Mary Wilson, Associate Professor of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health has appeared in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases (CID 2010; 51(10):1227–1228).

Some excerpts:

[GIDEON] has now developed the GIDEON e-books system. This massive database, 411 books with 95,000 pages, presents material in 2 formats, by country and by infectious disease. Data are culled from papers published in journals, textbooks, Health Ministry publications, and materials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

…

The advantages of the system are many. It is an extraordinary database. It assembles a vast amount of material and makes it available in a consistent format.

Dr. Stephen Toovey wrote a nice review of GIDEON in the Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease journal. He says “…there is no doubt that travel medicine practitioners, infectious disease physicians and microbiologists in need of a serious database will have to consider Gideon”

A quote from the most recent review of GIDEON in JAMA (2005):
“…an intellectual tour de force for helping physicians quickly and successfully respond to the diagnostic and therapeutic problems of seeing patients with infectious illnesses that either are intrinsically complex or may have originated in unfamiliar, foreign settings. In times when exotic travel brings exotic diseases into our offices, GIDEON provides world-class consultation. It continues to be the best designed expert program I have seen for medical practice.”

GIDEON in previous incarnations has been reviewed in JAMA in the past:

2002: “GIDEON is the epitome of its genre. If you are a clinician having any contact with infectious diseases, working in a microbiology laboratory … the Global Infectious Disease and Epidemiology Network is worth examining. This important program deserves widespread attention.”

1997: “Anyone who has never used a good artificial intelligence program would do well to start at the top with GIDEON”