Unlike the scientific literature, most information on the WWW has not had the scrutiny of peer review. Finally, despite the dramatic increase in the number of WWW users, most people still lack access to it. As noted, hundreds of Washington residents obtained flood-related prevention information via the Web, but many thousands without access, especially those whose homes were flooded, probably needed the same information. The Ugly Several aspects of the WWW are problematic or clumsy, but are likely to be improved in the next few years. The first is security.
Most Web sites allow anonymous users to freely browse among the documents on their sites.
This is obviously not appropriate for sensitive information such as patient records or detailed data sets. The WWW has generally not been used for transmitting public health surveillance data. The Web is good for delivering files from a central computer to end users, but it is clumsy for moving files in the other direction. Although this strategy permits only a basic sort of Web-based surveillance, it is an important beginning. Finally, the phenomenal success of the WWW threatens to clog the system.