Long-Term Survival of Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcus faecium on a Contaminated Surface

To the Editor:Online services provide a powerful form of communication that apparently is not being used to its full potential by professionals.These services allow infection control practitioners to post comments, questions, and answers on forums.Additionally, articles, documents, and program files can be uploaded to, and downloaded from, the forums' libraries.Subscribers to CompuServe can leave infection control messages on the public health forum, communicable diseases section.(I assume other online services have similar forums.)Other sections in this for um i n c l u d e L e g i s l a t i v e I s s u e s , I n f o r m a t i o n / S c i e n c e , H e a l t h Administration, and Environment and Health.Recent issues of the MMWR can be downloaded from the Public Health Library.Messages posted on the forum can be read by any online subscriber.This means that a message posted on a forum can be read and responded to by millions of people-within minutes of being posted.Readers can respond to posted messages publicly via the forum or privately via e-mail.Forum postings do not require specified recipients as opposed to e-mail messages.The implications of this form of communication are incalculable.There has been a lot written about the World Wide Web and how it is going to change forever how we communicate and conduct business.In 1996, the Association for Practitioners in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) debuted its Web homepage.As of August 1996, APIC has 11,500 individual members. 1 The 1996 APIC membership directory (based on 1995 membership data) lists approximately only 80 e-mail addresses.This number can be expected to rise dramatically in the next few years.