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BMJ No 7120 Volume 315 Letters Saturday 29 November 1997 Public health information on world wide web is hard to find Editor Impicciatore et al, and Wyatt in his commentary on their article, draw attention to the problem of the quality of public health information on the world wide web.(1) They do not, however, address the perhaps more serious issues of locating the information in the first place and the accessibility of this information to the general public. The two most widely used web browsers, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, have built in links to web pages devoted to searching the Internet. Both pages contain links to over 10 search engines. Different search engines implement complex searches in different ways, and the choice of terms can alter dramatically the number of results returned. The Alta Vista search engine yields no results when the search pattern 'fever management' and 'child' and 'parent information' is used,(2) whereas the same search performed with Yahoo yields 3,563 results(3) and with Excite yields 2,632,740 results.(4) We doubt anyway that these search terms are the ones that a lay person would use when looking for information about `treating a high temperature' or `treating a fever.' If this search for information is prompted by the illness of a child, rather than academic interest, how much time is an anxious parent going to spend on the search? Even if parents restricted themselves to looking at the first 10 results from two search engines, this would still mean accessing 20 sites and trying to evaluate the quality of the information presented. The overwhelming likelihood is that the web page chosen as the definitive source of information will be of North American origin. What reaction would parents receive if they walked into a pharmacy in Britain and asked for acetaminophen? As it stands, the world wide web is a poor source of public health information, particularly for the non-North American public, but publishing information on the web is a cheap and relatively simple way of disseminating information to a large audience and keeping that information up to date. The numbers of parents with access to the Internet from home is low (only 7% of adults in Britain have access to the Internet(5)). Efforts must be made to increase the availability of access to the Internet, as well as to increase the quality of the information, if the enormous potential of the Internet as an educational medium is to be realised. David A Agbamu Consultant histopathologist Department of Histopathology, Arrowe Park Hospital, Upton, Wirral L49 5PE email: dagbamu@pathologists.org.uk Ewen Sim Specialist registrar in histopathology Department of Histopathology, Hope Hospital, Salford M6 8HD References 1 Impicciatore P, Pandolfini C, Casella N, Bonati M. Reliability of health information for the public on the world wide web: systematic survey of advice on managing fever in children at home [with commentary by J C Wyatt]. BMJ 1997;314:1875-81. (28 June.) 2 Alta Vista. URL: http://www.altavista.digital.com 3 Yahoo. URL: http://www.yahoo.com 4 Excite. URL: http://www.excite.com 5 Internet Marketing Hotlist: http://www.internet-sales.com/hot/ukover.shtml Home | Current issue | Past issues | Classified ads | Career Focus | Feedback Collections | About this site | About the BMJ | BMA | Medline