Abstract
To the Editor.— Your speculations about physician's assistants and satellite communications in sparsely populated Alaska (227:935, 1974) read like a description of an experimental program that the National Library of Medicine and the Indian Health Service have sponsored for the past three years, as well as a blueprint for its planned expansion later this year. Since June 1971, native health aides in 26 remote villages in Alaska have had regular daily voice contact, via the ATS-1 satellite, with an Indian Health Service field hospital in Tanana. This has proved a vast improvement over regular high-frequency radio communication which, because of terrain and atmospheric disturbances, is unreliable in those parts. The experimental satellite system has been credited with saving several lives. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite to be launched later this year, the ATS-F, will allow two-way video and physiological data transmission at certain sites in Alaska, in addition
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