I really enjoyed reading your website reviews because they were funny and informative. I found the topic fascinating. However, you are missing your titles and I had to kinda guess which one is which. It also made me realize that I forgot to give mine titles too.
I think you did a great job explaining what leprosy is. I also think you did a good job of relating your topic back to A & P. I think the best part of your review for me was when you get into the paucibacillary and multibacillary. For me that was interesting.
I didn’t see anything else lacking besides the title.

Chris, your upper website review doesn't seem to be missing anything; however, include which website is being reviewed in your title (i.e. "Major Website Review").

The summary of your website could be improved by telling what the website covers. Does it encompass basic facts about Hansens's Disease, personal stories, etc.? And since the website itself does not really relate to A&P, go beyond the content of the website and tell your audience how the disease itself relates to A&P by explainging what it is and what is does. On the other hand, I thought you did a good job explaining the two best features and the two worst features of the website.


By looking at the content in the website from your bottom review, I'm guessing this is your major website review. Once again, be sure to include which website is being reviewed in your title. In addition, this website review seems to be missing links to those subpages where you found the best and worst features of the website.

I thought you did a good job elucidating how your website relates to A&P. You took a direct quote from the website and then broke it down in order to elaborate on the differecnt aspects of leprosy. Also, your tone of voice made this website review more appealing to read. The only flaws I see in your major website review are a couple sentence fragments. The ones I caught were close to the bottom the review, and they were written as follows: "Or if you cut yourself?", and "But, man, some of those terms." I can understand that one might use fragments to emphasize tone, but little grammar errors like that bug the crap out of me when I read them as an audience. My suggestion would be to just make them into complete sentences.

I think the first website is the major site. Maybe you could edit your review to state that. I liked your witty style with this paper. You were humorous but still answered the questions required. I think you could have expanded a bit more on how this related back to A&P though. But overall I enjoyed your review.

Your second website review is the minor one I'm guessing also. I enjoyed this one as well. Your review was brief and easy to understand. I think it also covered everything and I liked how you touched on the three highlights of the website. The only thing I think that is lacking in this review is also how it relates back to A&P even though it's more of a site for support than information.

http://www.hansensdisease.org/index.html: Support for Those with Hansen’s Disease


 The self titled Support For People With Hansen's Disease/Leprosy website is, as shown in the title, a site designed for those who actually have Hansen’s Disease, more commonly known as leprosy. The author, Nicole Holmes, initially created the site to help with her own problems with the disease. As time went on, the site expanded to help more and more people deal with the emotional and physical aspects of leprosy.

 As this website was not designed to educate about what Hansen’s Disease is or does, very little technical information can be gleaned. Noting this, there are three different medical points that the site tries to get across. First, that Hansen’s Disease is curable by the taking of three drugs at the same time, a treatment called MDT. Second, that families with an infected individual can still remain together as the disease is not communicable after treatment. Indeed, almost 95% of the world is immune to the disease. Third, that “there is no place for stigma.” Persons with leprosy are often looked down upon with the brand “leper” being attached and shunned even though most people cannot contract the disease.

 One highlight of the site is the direct help and support someone afflicted by leprosy can obtain directly from the site’s creator and from a supporting organization called IDEA, which is a large international group helping those with leprosy. Nicole, the website creator, is directly contactable by either phone or email. Another highlight is the inspirational stories given by those actually afflicted by the disease and are still going strong.

 Something that the site is rather missing, even though it is only a support group, is an explanation of what leprosy is. What the disease effects is not discussed at all, the writer apparently assuming that the reader already knows. This can be rather confusing, especially if it is family or friends of an afflicted individual who is researching the site.

Edited by author 11-19-2007 07:00 PM
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/hansens_t.htm: The Government on Leprosy

   The government run Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website was created by the Department of Health and Human Services to help inform the public about dangerous diseases in order "to promote health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease, injury, and disability." The CDC covers a myriad of topics, one of which is Hansen’s disease.
   First, before we really get started, I have a disclaimer: I am going to try an abnormal writing for this paper. Instead a boring dissertation on Hansen’s disease and the CDC’s article, I will present the rest of the paper in an almost “dialogous” fashion. Now we can begin: The CDC provides a very concise and informative definition of what Hansen’s disease actually is. Because of my personal love of quotes, I will present it for you (yes, you) and then explain piece by piece as the terminology can be a little confusing.
           “This chronic infectious disease usually affects the skin and peripheral nerves but has a wide range of possible clinical manifestations. Patients are classified as having paucibacillary or multibacillary Hansen's disease. Paucibacillary Hansen's disease is milder and characterized by one or more hypopigmented skin macules. Multibacillary Hansen's disease is associated with symmetric skin lesions, nodules, plaques, thickened dermis, and frequent involvement of the nasal mucosa resulting in nasal congestion and epistaxis.”
   All right, let’s get to it then. The first thing that you should notice is that Hansen’s disease mainly effects the skin and the PNS. Perfect, right? I mean, how much closer could you get to what we’ve been learning (or teaching) about all semester? The next is that there are two types of Hansen’s disease: the paucibacillary, which means “few bacteria” and the multibacillary, which means “many bacteria”. Logically then, it would make sense that the presence of many bacteria would have a greater impact then few bacteria of the same kind, as is the actual case. The effects, as stated above, of the paucibacillary Hansen ’s disease are hypopigmented skin macules. This means that an afflicted person’s melanocytes aren’t producing enough melanin in differing spots causing those with Hansen’s disease to be paler in some places than is their body’s wont (and yes, wont is a word…). Multibacillary leprosy is where things get ugly and is what we usually think of when we think of leprosy. Skin lesions, nodules (build-ups of tissue… almost like the opposite of lesions), and epistaxis (a constant nosebleed) are only the cutaneous manifestions of the disease. Although the site doesn’t go into it, the PNS is severly damaged by leprosy, causing a loss of feeling and sometimes paralysis. The loss of feeling is why those with untreated Hansen ’s disease are so often terribly disfigured. Think about it: if you had absolutely no feeling in your arm, how would you know if you put your hand on a hot stove? Or if you cut yourself? With no feeling, horrendous damage can occur.
   One of the best features of this article is the brief, clear way that the information is presented. Apart from some clinical terms, the entire article is easily understood. But, man, some of those terms. In fact, that is one problem that I had with the site: lots of terms, and no definitions or links to definitions. Another problem that I had was the lack of info on the impact of leprosy on the PNS. The listed symptoms concentrated almost solely on the cutaneous effects of the disease.
-Chris Underwood

Chris,
Very interesting topic and websites. the Support for People with Hansen's seems like it would be a good minor website to review. The other ones are more major...the CDC has a ton of great info. Your peers have done a nice job providng some detailed feedback..nothing to add there.
LF
Choose topic: 10 points
Find four websites: 20 points
Peer reviews: 10 points

#1. In general I enjoy the CDC web pages because they are short and to the point and they also have reliable information. I mean yeah they could go into depth with their information, but in this case I’m glad they didn’t. I am easily confused and short explanations make my life a lot easier.
#2. This is a good little article about Hansen’s disease. It answers my basic questions of who, what and why? I also like the fact that it has related articles and a whole medicine web search that you can perform on “Hansen’s disease”.
#3. Wow! This is an excellent website. I think it pretty much has everything and anything I ever would need to know about Hansen’s disease. I especially like how it is laid out with a history, lab studies and other things! Very impressive!
#4. This website seems like it is primarily for people with Hansen’s disease. I didn’t find a wealth of information on who, what or why but it did answer some questions and what the people had to say was interesting.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/hansens_t.htm A very straight forward approach. This site provides you with a basic idea what the disease entails and how common it is. The only downside to the site is that it is very brief.

http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=3652 This site also is a great quick reference on the subject for people who are interested in the basic facts about the disease. It would not be all that helpful for a patient who was suffereing from the disease as they probably would have already gained most of this information from their doctors.

http://www.emedicine.com/oph/topic743.htm This is a way cool website obviously geared toward physicians and other healthcare professionals. It gives a very thorough in depth look at what the signs and symptoms of the disease are, as well as what has been learned about the disease in the clinical setting. I thought the site was very interesting but I suppose some might find it a bit overwhelming.

http://www.hansensdisease.org/index.html This site was interesting but brief. Very little facts about the disease are dealt with and it is mainly a support site for people who have been affected by the disease. They do an excellent job of creating a feeling of support with their words and their pictures, and also with their brief facts about the disease that seem to show that it is very treatable.

1. The first page tells basic information, groups that are at risk of this disease, of a certain story and other very specific information about it.

2. the medterms site is a basic yet thorough insight to this disease and will give you good information to this disease.

3. This site seemed to be very statistical to me, had really good information on a broad level.

4. This site is a support website for people with Hansen's disease. You could contact them if you had any questions or needed help with anything about this disease.

The 1st website was brief and to point, and provided other links. I could've displayed a little more info. or even show some pictures/ diagrams.

The 2nd website was informative and your source seemed reliable. This website also could've benefited from some pictures, diagrams as well.

The 3rd website was awesome. It had lots of pictures, detailed information, and treatments for the disease. I couldn't think of anything I disliked about it.

I like how the 4th website contained personal stories, and facts about the disease, and it was easy to follow. I didn't like the photos though. I thought they would be photos of symptoms of the disease.

I thought this first website was brief and to the point. It contained other related links, but maybe it could have shown some diagrams.

I thought the second website was very informative also. This would have also benefitted from pictures too.

The third website was great. It contained tons of information, pictures, and medications used to treat the disease. I really liked this website.

The fourth website was wonderful too. This contained personal stories, had facts about the disease, and was easy to understand.

#1 This website seemed very limited. It had an information page but not much else.
#2 This website was pretty informative and had a lot of links to find out more.
#3 This website had a lot of statistical information which is interesting I thought.
#4 I liked this one too because it not only had info about Hansen's but also provides a support group for people.

List of Websites:

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/hansens_t.htm
 -The Center for Disease Control and Prevention website is a government-run site designed to provide a brief explanation to the general public about various disease and the ways in which to prevent them. No author is listed for the given information.

http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=3652
 -MedicineNet is a website dedicated to bringing information to the biologically-educated public. With a little bit more detail than the previous site, this could be a good place to start while getting to know what leprosy really is. No author is listed.

http://www.emedicine.com/oph/topic743.htm
 -The eMedicine Clinical Knowledge Base comprises constantly updated medical review articles. Nearly 10,000 contributors have created over 6,500 medical review articles within the Clinical Knowledge Base. All eMedicine articles go through a 5-step peer-review process (four physicians and a Doctor of Pharmacy) to ensure that a consistently high level of content quality is maintained. (Quoted directly from site)
 Doctors Eva C Kim and Joseph B. Michelson do not specifically state why they have posted such an extensive overview of Hansen’s disease. By inference, we may assume that it had to do with the fact that they are both ophthalmologists. This posting is extensive and probably only meant for those in the health profession.

http://www.hansensdisease.org/index.html
 -This is a website, created by Nicole Holmes in 2001, meant to be an encouragement for those afflicted by Hansen’s disease. The website contains a small amount of information on the disease, along with a couple personal stories by persons actually afflicted by leprosy.

I have chosen this topic because I believe that although tuberculoid leprosy is almost completely absent in the United States due to medical advancements, it is still a problem that needs to be addressed in other third world countries.
This topic is directly related to what we have been learning in Anatomy and Physiology I, as tuberculoid leprosy almost exclusively affects skin and nerves.