RIYADH, 13 May — The scourge of cancer in his family led a management executive in a Saudi company to develop a website on cancer, which has already started getting hits within a week of its launch.
“I have received over 40,000 hits from different countries, 43 percent of them from Saudi Arabia, followed by Australia with 18 percent,” Nabil Audeh, the executive, told newsmen.
He said the website, The World Against Cancer (TWAC), accessible on www.twac.org, offers up-to-the-minute information on cancer, including the types of cancer, prevention, diagnosis, the role of conventional and complementary medicine, cancer news, treatment options, cutting edge research and clinical trials.
According to him, accessibility to TWAC is facilitated by the introduction of multiple multilingual search engines and translation facilities that render all relevant information on the World Wide Web available to the user without having to leave TWAC, thus making it a one-stop cancer information source.
“There are 33 search engines on my site in English and 1,500 search engines in different languages covering 149 countries. This is in addition to computer-aided translation facilities for translating information from one language to another — the level of acceptability ranging from 80 to 85 percent,” he observed.
“I read 33,000 pages of medical literature in three months, working seven hours a day to develop the website, which contains 3.5 million topics and sub-topics on cancer for reference,” Audeh said, adding: “I tried to search for information everywhere — from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
He said one major difficulty that he encountered in providing a link to search engines in India was the lack of computer-aided translation facility for translating cancer literature from Indian languages into English. Audeh pointed out that TWAC is designed to be an interactive website. Users are encouraged to propose new links, suggest new features that they would like to see, or any items that should be improved or deleted.
“In this way the site can thrive and grow geometrically, spreading its tentacles like cancer, but this time in the dissemination of a body of knowledge of such power, magnitude and acceleration that it can successfully engage and conquer cancer,” he adds.
