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Things might have turned out differently if he hadn't gotten so sick in Guatemala just before medical school. But then, travel physicians tend to be folks "who share a love of adventure, and generally travel themselves," says Stephen Blythe, MD. The De nver family physician's travel site (http://www.travelhealth.com/) is a bit more personal than most, with accounts of a bad rash after snorkeling near jellyfish, ethnobotany for mild altitude illness and a "Brief History of Tropical Illness" illust rated with archival images from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. But it's got "all the usual vaccine stuff," he says, just like more-traditional sites such as the Medical College of Wisconsin's Travelers' clinic (http://www.intmed.mcw.edu/travel.html), CDC's compendium of outbreaks and prophylactic measures (http://www.cdc.gov/travel/) and WHO's disease-surveillance home page (http://www.who.ch/programmes/emc/emc_home.htm).

Travel medicine is an Internet natural: Patients and their doctors just can't keep up on the latest microbes in Myanmar. Indeed, travel generally - people at widely distributed points needing to interactively access localized data - lends itself especi ally well to on-line treatment. Airline reservation systems were one of the big developments when computers went from punched cards to interactive terminals. In pioneering direct reservations, Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net/) linked wired consumers to the same SABRE database your travel agent uses. Now, such sites abound, often letting you type your seat and meal preferences and sign up for low-fare alerts.

Similar systems book rooms at more than 20,000 hotels in 5,000 cities (http://www.travelnow.com/). Other darned handy sites include one about getting a passport, with an application, how to obtain your birth certificate, and passport agency listings (http://travel.state.gov/passport_services.html); a place that collects embassy home pages (http://www.embpage.org/), and one for hotels (http://www.all-hotels.com/); a doctor-run firm that sells travel-related items like bug spray and shortwave radios (http://travmed.com/); and the remarkable TeleAdapt (http://www.teleadapt.com/), which has not only geopolitical data, but the telecom standard for your target country, a picture of the phone jack you'll need, and a form to order it. And how about this - an interacti ve-phrasebook (http://www.travlang.com/languages/) for tourists to bone up ... "Cliquer ici pour un nouveau guide d'Internet!"

Travel zines like Roam (http://www.roam.org/) and Vagabond Monthly (http://www2.globaldialog.com/~tpatmaho/) abound with ripping yarns to get you psyched for your trip, while Roadside America (http://www.roadsideamerica.com/) and diner-food exponent Roadside magazine (http://www.roadsidemagazine.com/) can direct you to the delights of backroads and byways.

Generic travel sites are legion, from sedate Fodor's (http://www.fodors.com/) to CNN's techy page (http://www.cnn.com/TRAVEL/), with its in-and-out-zooming Shockwave maps. For most destinations, whether you plan tourism or relocation, a search will reveal tons of sites for those who want to go there. For those who don't, the virtual travel services - like Being There (http://www.valpro.com/bethere/) and Terraquest (http://www.terraquest.com/) - will let you say you did.

But the travel-med sites will not lack for business so long as we have operations like Fielding's DangerFinder (http://www.fieldingtravel.com/dp/), which specializes in destinations where you have at least some chance of getting sick or injured.

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Personalized products sold on-line now include vitamins compounded to customer specifications.
http://www.acumins.com/index5.html

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Q: I can't take time away from my busy practice to go out and buy Christmas presents, but isn't it asking for trouble to give out your credit card on the Internet?

A: A little fresh air and holiday cheer are essential, even for busy doctors! As for your credit card, it's a lot like giving it out over the phone ù or in person. For more: http://learnthenet.com/english/toolbar/faq.htm#credit

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NETworking is compiled by Nina Sandlin, amednews staff.