Persian language health websites on Ebola disease: less credible than you think?

Abstract

Background: Ebola virus disease is an emergency situation in the area of international public health for which currently, there is no standard treatment. Thus, there is an essential need for awareness of individuals about the Ebola disease and consequently its prevention. Internet and health websites are considered a source of health information about certain diseases. Therefore, in this study, the credibility of Persian-language websites on Ebola is assessed. Materials and methods: The term "Ebola" was searched using the Yahoo, Google, and Bing search engines. The first 30 websites resulting from each search engine were studied. Persian language was a prerequisite for inclusion. Duplicate and inaccessible websites were excluded and 62 websites were retained for evaluation. These websites were manually assessed by the researchers. The research tool was HONcode official toolbar as well as the checklist set by the researchers based on the HONcode of Conduct tool. The data were analyzed using SPSS 18.0 software. Results: None of the retrieved websites was officially approved by the HONcode of Conduct. Moreover, the manual evaluation showed that none of them had fully considered the eight criteria of HONcode. The results showed that most of the retrieved websites (62%) were commercial. The justifiability criterion had been considered in 89% of the studied websites, but the authority criterion had been considered by only 16% of the websites. Conclusion and recommendations: Regarding the poor reliability of Persian websites on the Ebola disease, and considering that Persian language people prefer to read the information in their native language, it is recommended that the authorized health organizations introduce reliable health websites in the Persian language. This will help them to take part in active healthcare decision-making and disease prevention. Moreover, it is necessary to educate people especially Persian language ones about the website evaluation tools, which can be used to assess the credibility of health websites before consuming the information on those websites.

Are health websites credible enough for elderly self-education in the most prevalent elderly diseases?

“…The privacy policy is among seven core issues of website usability design and is of particular importance in creating effective websites [ 60 ]. Most websites assessed in this study had specified their privacy policy which is in line with the researches that have been carried out on other health topics [ 43 , 44 ].…”

“…In the present study, only 64.8% of the surveyed websites had specified the name and expertise of the authors (Table 2 ). In similar studies evaluating websites on MERS disease [ 45 ], and websites on Ebola disease [ 44 ], the authority was the least considered criterion [ 58 ], while patients need sufficient information about the author’s identity to be able to assess the trustworthiness of information [ 48 ]. Therefore, health websites on the most prevalent elderly diseases need to pay more attention to this criterion to increase their trustworthiness for their readers.…”

“…In the current study, the proportion of websites that were in compliance with HONcode principles did not differ by search engines as well as diseases (Table 3 ). While, in other studies on health websites related to periodontal disease and Ebola virus disease, the websites retrieved by Google were in greater compliance with the HONcode criteria [ 44 , 61 ]. Furthermore, most of the websites that were appeared on the first page of search engine results were completely in compliance with HONcode principles, though, the difference was not statistically significant (Table 3 ).…”

Health websites on COVID-19: are they readable and credible enough to help public self-care?

“…HONcode is the oldest and most-used ethical and trustworthiness code for medical and health-related information available on the Internet [64]. It is reliable and has been used in multiple studies to assess the credibility of health websites [11,12,[14][15][16][65][66][67]. Therefore, we used the HONcode toolbar to identify certified websites containing information on COVID-19.…”

“…On March 13, 2020, Google Trends reported that the term "coronavirus" was searched five million times (supplemental appendix), underlining the importance of the Internet as a source for health information. However, multiple studies demonstrate that health websites may not be credible and may contain inaccurate or misleading information [11][12][13][14][15][16]. Therefore, the information found on health websites could increase uncertainty and anxiety and, thereby, serve to harm people's health [17][18][19].…”