FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MALARIA SERVER.

>I am going to some tropical country, what tablets should I take to prevent getting malaria?

We do not answer specific questions about drug prophylaxis in malaria on this list. The reason is that the choice of drug is complex and depends on among other factors, your previous medical history and the exact destination and length of stay. Proper prophylaxis involves other measures apart from drug therapy. You should consult your personal physician.

Additionally, the giving of medical advice by individuals renders them potentially liable if the advice should be incorrect. No-one wishes to become the first physician sued for Internet malpractice.

Publicly available information about the status of malaria in different countries may be obtained from the following URLs.

a)International Travel and Health, WHO's "Yellow Book", will be available on the WHOSIS (WHO Statistical Information System) via the WWW in the not too distant future. There may even be a clickable world map sometime thereafter.

b)One can also refer to CDC's Travel Information Page, where there is already a clickable map, too.

c)Current National Health and Medical Research Council Recommendations for malaria prophylaxis for Australians travelling to malaria endemic areas are available. The Malaria directory also includes a file copied from the CDC gopher on recommendations for US citizens.

****** Our advice is to contact your physician or travel medicine clinic.

>I haven't received any messages for a couple of weeks. Am I still subscribed?

You may not be (see below). To find out, send a message to listserv@wehi.edu.au

Leave the message line blank and in the body of the message put

recipients malaria

You will be mailed a list of all people subscribed to the malaria list. Check if you are still there. If not resubscribe.

>Can't seem to unsubscribe

This list seems to have gone fairly smoothly until recently. Of late the process of unsubscribing seems to have caused a lot of grief.
This list is using the "listserv" software on a Unix box. We acknowledge that the "majordomo" software is probably more dominant in the Unix field - we are looking at that software when its current development phase is complete. However "listserv" works quite well when sent the appropriate "listserv" commands.
The unsubscribing process is conditional on the subscriber having a soundly configured e-mail environment in their home/host institution. The "listserv" management routines use the "behind the scenes" aspects of your subscribe and unsubscribe email messages to create and delete you from the mail lists. It is all very well for you to think that your email address is

jbloggs@institute.org.country

And you always get email when someone sends email to that address. The troubles arise when the sending desktop has other ideas.
Ther are many complicating scenarios - here is one: if your email package on your desktop computer or even a set of computers in your office area or lab is not configured to emit the above as your email address when you use email then "listserv" is going to have trouble. If you use say desktop computer that is named for example pc123. But the email preferences are not configured properly so any email from that machine has a return/reply address of

jbloggs@pc123.institute.org.country

You are blissfully unaware. For replies to this address, your central email delivery server always looks after these oddities and treats it as jbloggs@institute.org.country and delivers your mail to where you want it. It could be that you use dozens of different desktops to send email all with incomplete mail setups so your mail goes out under all sorts of guises

jbloggs@xxxx.institute.org.country

But thanks to your well configured central mail delivery server for the domain "institute.org.country", all replies and returns always get treated as "jbloggs@institute.org.country" and are sent to the same mail system and host no matter what.
But the MALARIA listserv does not know about your internal email configs and adds you as it sees you:

jbloggs@pc123.institute.org.country

And therefore you have to be "jbloggs@pc123.institute.org.country" to unsubscribe from the list!!
All this has become more prevalent with the use of self configured Netscape amd MS IE browsers as email tools.
So to unsubscribe from the MALARIA list, use a computer with the email config that you were using when you subscribed in the first place. Then you send an email message to

listserv@wehi.edu.au

YOU LEAVE THE SUBJECT LINE EMPTY

Then in the body of the message include on one line only:

unsubscribe malaria

And absolutely nothing else!!!! And note that you are sending the message to

 listserv@wehi.edu.au    NOT    malaria@wehi.edu.au 
Now if you cannot use an email system with the email config of when you subscribed (system config has changed, you email address has changed, you cannot remember how you subscribed....), then send a short polite request to

malariamgr@wehi.edu.au

requesting that you be deleted and please indicate what you think your subscription address might be. However remember time zones - manual requests to be deleted from the USA on a Friday (ie when it is already almost midnight Friday or later in Australia) will not reliably be attended to until Monday morning Melbourne Australian time - so you might still get two days or so malaria messages before the request is handled. (We are about 14 hrs ahead of US East coast time)

>I used to get the malaria list but I don't seem to get any messages anymore, What is going on?

The list is run by an automatic program that monitors messages being sent out and received. If it notices that messages are persistently failing to get through to a particular e-mail address, it will eventually purge that address from the list. It does this to stop flooding the net with useless messages that bounce between machines.

However occasionally messages fail to get through for reasons related to network traffic or changes by local e-mail administrators. If this happens, it may trigger the programs purge routine. Therefore you may be dropped from the list even though you still want it.

Unfortunately there is not much I can do about this as it is coded into the listserver program I am using. The only alternative is to subscribe again by sending a message to listserv@wehi.edu.au

Send a one line message

subscribe malaria {Your Preferred name}

>I'm on the subscriber list but I don't get messages. What the hell is going on?

If the automatic program gets persistent failures in sending to your address, it puts you on an inactive status. Thus you are subscribed but no longer sent messages. To become an active recipient again send a message to listserv@wehi.edu.au

set malaria mail noack

>OK, I'm getting the messages and I love the list, but I want to suspend receiving messages while I go away. How do I do it?

Send a message to listserv@wehi.edu.au Leave the comment line blank and in the body of the message type

set malaria mail postpone

No messages will be sent to you until you change mode again. To resume receiving messages send the message to listserv@wehi.edu.au

set malaria mail noack

>I'd love the e-mail address of this person. Do you have it?

To check e-mail addresses of members of the list send a message to listserv@wehi.edu.au

Leave the message line blank and in the body of the message put

recipients malaria

You will be mailed a list of all people currently subscribed to the malaria list including their e-mail addresses.


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