I am a Malaysian, with more than 25 years in Senior Leadership roles in pharmaceutical industry managing medical affairs, regulatory, R&D in both Pharma and Vaccines. Was Operational medical head in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia (based in Kuala Lumpur), India, Sri Lanka, Nepal(based in Mumbai) and South Korea (based in Seoul) in Pharma and Head of Dengue Medical Affairs (Vaccines) Asia-Pacific based in Singapore. Last held position, Head of Medical Affairs ASEAN for Sanofi based in Singapore, Medical Director for Celgene South Korea, Medical Director BMS in Taiwan and Vice President, Novavax Asia-Pacific. Working currently as an independent Consultant and sit in several Advisory Boards. Prior to joining the industry was in Malaysia Ministry of Health as Chief Medical Officer of one of the largest district hospital as well as Head Public Health Officer of this district.
Asked Gemini (NotebookLM) to summarise my web input and this is what it produced below.
Imagine a health concern today. Your first instinct is to pull out a device and summon an answer from the digital ether. Within seconds, you have access to the polished, authoritative resources of the CDC, WHO, and WebMD.
Now, rewind to 1995. Hear the piercing screech of a dial-up modem. Picture a web of slow-loading text, a vast and uncharted territory with no central index. Information wasn't searched for; it was stumbled upon, like an explorer finding an uncharted island. It was onto this digital frontier that a Malaysian doctor, Dr. Muruga Vadivale, staked a claim, launching "Vads Corner" on October 12, 1995. From this small outpost, he began meticulously chronicling emerging diseases and creating a codex for other doctors navigating the new world of the internet.
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Excavating the site's archived homepage is like unearthing a digital Rosetta Stone for early online public health communication. It contains a list of remarkable claims, asserting that this personal project was the world's first consolidated online resource for multiple major disease outbreaks. Today, this work would be the domain of massive, well-funded global health organizations; then, it was the passion project of a single individual.
The homepage makes a series of extraordinary claims:
The site also notes that its pages were "one of the first in the world" to collate information on other significant threats, including SARS, Influenza A(H5N1), and West Nile Fever. And his pioneering spirit wasn't limited to public health; the site also claims to be home to the "Manipal Alumni Association, Malaysia. - The world's first Manipal Alumni site!," demonstrating an early understanding of the web's power to build community.
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Dr. Vadivale's work wasn't just about cataloging diseases; he was a digital evangelist for his medical colleagues. His very first "Cybermed" column for the Malaysian Medical Association Newsletter, published in March 1997, was titled "Internet for Doctors-Getting Started." He was identifying the internet's immense potential for the medical profession when many early settlers of the web were still skeptical of its utility.
His other articles reveal a mind looking far over the horizon. He wrote about "Medical Search Engines" in March 1998, but even more prescient was his column from August 1997, which tackled a concept that was pure science fiction for most practitioners relying on unreliable dial-up connections:
Telemedicine
For a doctor in 1997 to be seriously writing about remote medical consultation—an idea that would take another two decades and a global pandemic to become mainstream—is a stunning digital artifact of his foresight. He understood that the tool was only as good as the user, and he was training them to use it.
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The list of Dr. Vadivale's "Cybermed" articles between 1997 and 2000 reads like a real-time codex of major public health crises unfolding across Southeast Asia. He was using the web for rapid information sharing long before social media existed.
This digital chronicle is striking. He wrote the creatively titled "Hazedous" in October 1997. This was followed by articles on "OUTBREAK (ENTEROVIRUS) REVISITED…..TAIWAN" in June 1998, "Japanese Encephalitis" in January 1999, "Chikungunya Virus Outbreak and the Influenza ?Pandemic" in February 1999, and the "Nipah Virus Outbreak" in May 1999.
One of his article titles from June 1999 serves as a powerful, standalone statement on the anxieties of the era:
Enterovirus, Haze, Nipah and Dioxin. What's Next?
These digital artifacts show the early, open web at its best: a platform for passionate experts to share critical knowledge with the public in moments of crisis.
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Dr. Vadivale is a visionary. From a humble corner of the early web, he demonstrated the internet's immense potential for public health, medical education, and crisis communication. He saw not just a network of computers, but a tool to connect, educate, and inform when it mattered most.
His work—creating "world's first" resources for deadly outbreaks from his personal homepage—is a testament to the power of individual initiative on the open web. It is a digital ruin that reminds us of a time when the internet was a frontier built by passionate experts. His non-commercial, public-service ethos stands in stark contrast to today's algorithm-driven, often monetized, and siloed online health information landscape.
Last updated 30th Jan 2026. (not the picture :))
e-mail:- cyberdoc@outlook.com
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