The world's countries at a glance. Useful for geographic orientation, an overview of essential health, environmental and population characteristics. This is frequently updated and has many relevant information to public health such as trafficking in persons, environmental challenges and transnational disputes. Well-documented notes and appendices make it an important authoritative source.

HNPStats- the World Bank's Health, Nutrition and Population data platform -  a one-stop data source for health, nutrition and population indicators from various national and international data sources. It provides direct access to more than 100 indicators, with time series for countries and country groups from 1960 to the most recent year, where data are available.

OECD is Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development,  whose membership consists of 30 countries in western and eastern Europe. Also includes Japan and Korea, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. It collects health statistics from its members and has relationships with other developing countries such as China, Brazil and Russia.

The WHO Statistical Information System is the guide to health and health-related epidemiological and statistical information available from the World Health Organization. An important report is the World Health Report, published annually. You can find the core health indicators for countries here.

A global disease alert program draws from disparate data sources to provide visualization of outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts from WHO.  The data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. Due to the nature of the links, you can get up-to-date disease reports from the original language source from Asia and Europe. This interface is available in English and Spanish and news accounts are often translated, providing access to far flung regions not usually covered by conventional press.

A daily health and medical news service covering numerous disease categories. A searchable archive back to 2003 and a built-in medical dictionary and a clinical trials search box enhance the site. Many global ethnic and minority health concerns are covered here

This online news digest service from the Center for Health Communication at the Harvard School of Public Health offers a combination of orginal reporting and a digest of news stories from newspapers and magazines worldwide on pressing public health issues.The "News and Commentary" section focusses on health news from Africa, North America, Asia and Europe. 

Newspaper collections from NewsBank provide full-text articles from the electronic editions of record for more than 700 newspapers around the globe, including the NY Times (2000-present). Database covers 1977-present.

Especially useful for consideration bioethical issues. Hosted by the Kennedy School of Ethics this site indexes journal articles, book chapters, bills, laws, court decisions, reports, books, audio-visuals, and news articles relating to bioethics and professional ethics.

Full-text of thousands of newspapers, magazines, news transcripts, reference works, and legal materials. Includes NY Times (1980-current)

Provides abstracts of journal articles, books, government documents, statistical compilations, committee reports, intergovernmental, and private organizations reports. Areas covered include political, economic, social and public policy issues. Covers 1915-present.

Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines, both scholarly and popular in scope. Covers 1971-present. A great first database to search. Numerous sources range from popular magazines to peer-reviewed science journals.

Includes over 15 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. Includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources. PubMed is the National Library of Medicine's search service that provides access to over 11 million citations in MEDLINE, PreMEDLINE, and other related databases, with links to participating online journals. PubMed contains bibliographic citations and abstracts from approximately 3900 current biomedical journals. Many journals are available through our subscription or free courtesy of  PubMed Central. Follow the MORE! link to see if we can get access for you through TriCollege or InterLibrary loan.

Provides full-text access to life sciences journal literature. Sponsored by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Coverage dates vary by journal. Many public health journals concerning minority and ethnic health topics can be found here by keyword search. It is a good complementary source to a PubMed search.

Searches against the same database but with relevance ranking. Search terms are highlighted for easy scanning of results. Worth using for a first go-around. For more in-depth searching or more targeted searching using medical subject headings, use PubMed. You also get the convenient FindIt link to fulltext if you connect to Pubmed through Tripod.

For Haverford College users, this provides access to the Social Sciences Citation Index 1997-present , Science Citation Index 1972 - present. Search for scholarly articles in any discipline, or for articles that cite a known author or work. Coverage varies. Not just for citation searching (who cited whom) but also for general topic searching.

Provides full-text access to articles, dictionary terms, biographies, research updates and links to related websites in all areas of science and technology. Covers 2000-present. 

A one-stop information source to learn about disease conditions, patient education and research and patient support organizations for specific conditions. Sponsored by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

from the National Library of Medicine -Comprehensive site with information on drugs and supplements, medical dictionary and encyclopedia and convenient access to both consumer and professional level literature.

Explains diseases in simple English. Multimedia resources (animations, audio, photographs and videos) help illustrate complex subjects. Each topic has links to an audio glossary and multimedia.

This is the official site from NIH for finding clinical trials by condition, location, sponsor and status. Resources listed on the same page are useful for understanding  the process and the language used in clinical trials for a basic understanding in order to be an informed participant.

The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the approval of all drugs, biologicals, medical devices, cosmetics and radiological products. Check out this FDA Consumer Magazine article on clinical trials and what constitutes informed consent. The FDA homepage has links to appropriate information for various target audiences. Guidance documents on good clinical practices in clinical trials are posted.

ICH has issued guidelines and reports to achieve "a more economical use of human, animal and material resources, and the elimination of unnecessary delay in the global development and availability of new medicines whilst maintaining safeguards on quality, safety and efficacy, and regulatory obligations to protect public health." ICH has representations from the European Union, Japan and the United States. Some useful reports are E3 (Structure and Content of Clinical Study Reports), E5 (Ethnic Factors in the Acceptability of Foreign Clinical Data), E6 (Good Clinical Practice), E9 (Statistical Principles of Clinical Trials) and E10 (Choice of Control Group in Clinical Trials).