We frequently hear about one or another disease in the news, but rarely receive all the information we would like about its biological background. If you wish to find out more about the viruses that cause all this trouble, you could start by looking them up in 'AllthevirologyontheWWW'. The site was put together by David Sander and Robert Garry and it's maintained at Tulane University. Its declared aim is to “be the best single site for Virology information on the Internet”, and it certainly succeeds with over 3,000 links to web pages on almost every aspect of virology that you can think of.

This is an index site, and its aim is not to provide new information but to group and organize existing online information. The table of contents is easy to use, linking directly to pages on individual virus families. You can also link to pages containing general information on virology (including some excellent tutorials), virology labs, virology news, related social issues, a collection of images and much more.

One shortcoming is that the search page is not very useful, especially if you don't know the name of the virus. Typing in “foot and mouth”, for example, gives an alphabetical listing of viruses (M–P), and you need to read through every entry on the list before finding out that the virus responsible for foot-and-mouth disease is an Aphtovirus of the Picornaviridae family. But once you have the name, the information is only a few clicks away, ranging from the basic mechanisms of viral replication to instructions for farmers on how to diagnose the disease in their livestock. You probably won't learn very much about molecular cell biology, but the site is well worth a visit for the sake of improving your general knowledge.