News and promises

I have some exciting news to share with all those who count on the American Sleep Apnea Association to provide unbiased information on diagnosis and treatment on OSA... we have received a generous grant to remake our 1994 video "What is Sleep Apnea?" We are currently interviewing production companies and hope to begin production in September. It should be available just time for holiday gift-giving.

Updating the video has been on my list since I got to the association three and a half years ago - yeah!

The other important news of the day concerns our online support group - http://www.apneasupport.org/. Due to serious limitations with the current web hosting company's capacity to handle the increasing traffic to the site, the site co-adminstrator had to make an emergency move to a new host.

He handled the transfer of the incredible amount of wisdom accumulated over the past two year from contributors to the forum with the flawless grace of an NBA All Star shooting from the outside with only seconds to play... thank you Mike.

The new home of the Forum, which is on downtownhost.com, is now on a dedicated server and is faster than greased lightening. It is able to accommodate a much higher level of traffic without the usual degradation in speed. Recent statistics already show an increase in visitors, pageviews and new subscribers. If you have not been in a while or not at all... check it out, you won't be disappointed in what you can learn there.

On a side note... we get tons of email at our main email address - asaa@sleepapnea.org, sadly much of it spam, but that is the price of having your email address out there for folks to access with questions and comments. Looking at it last week, along with the usual inquiries, there was a message from a anesthesiologist in Kuwait looking for ways to work with the ASAA to help his patients, a jounalism student from Denmark doing research on sleep apnea in America looking for an expert sleep researcher to help him, and a former A.W.A.K.E. coordnator now residing in Singapore who is interested in setting up an A.W.A.K.E. support group there. One word - wow!

Now the promise, since my friend and colleague Dr. Breus has added me to his blogroll and I suspect that there may be others (thank you Michael and thank you everyone else)... I will commit to being more intentional about writing in this space on a regular basis to report on my doings and the work of the association.

These are exciting and very busy times and I am pleased to share our successes and challenges with all those who take the time to read this.

I'll be back.