title: Availability of information in Public Health on the Internet: An analysis of national health authorities in the Spanish-speaking Latin American and Caribbean countries.
abstract: Access to reliable and quality health information and appropriate medical advice can contribute to a dramatic reduction in the mortality figures of countries. The governments of the Americas are faced with the opportunity to continue working on this challenge, and their institutional presence on their websites should play a key role in this task. In a setting where the access to information is essential to both health professionals and citizens, it is relevant to analyze the role of national health authorities. Given that search engines play such a key role in the access to health information, it is important to specifically know - in connection to national health authorities - whether health information offered is easily available to the population, and whether this information is well-ranked in search engines.
  
  
  
  Quantitative methods were used to gather data on the institutional presence of national health authorities on the web. An exploratory and descriptive research served to analyze and interpret data and information obtained quantitatively from different perspectives, including an analysis by country, and also by leading causes of death. A total of 18 web pages were analyzed. Information on leading causes of death was searched on websites of national health authorities in the week of August 10-14, 2015.
  
  
  
  The probability of finding information of national health authorities on the 10 leading causes of death in a country, among the top 10 results on Google, is 6.66%. Additionally, ten out the 18 countries under study (55%) do not have information ranked among the top results in Google when searching for the selected terms. Additionally, a total of 33 websites represent the sources of information with the highest visibility for all the search strategies in each country on Google for the ten leading causes of death in a country. Two websites, the National Library of Medicine and Wikipedia, occur as a result with visibility in the total of eighteen countries of the sample.
  
  
  
  Taking into consideration that providing reliable and quality information on these topics to the population should be one of the priorities of national health authorities, these results suggest that national health authorities need to take measures to try to better position their contents.
authors.affiliation: Office of Knowledge Management, Bioethics and Research, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), United States. Electronic address: novillod@who.int.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Novillo-Ortiz
authors.affiliation: Department of Library Science and Documentation, University Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Tony
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hernández-Pérez
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Sciences, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain.
authors.forename: Francesc
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Saigí-Rubió
mesh_terms: D017691:Caribbean Region / Q000453:epidemiology; D002423:Cause of Death; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D007843:Latin America / Q000453:epidemiology; D009313:National Health Programs / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011634:Public Health / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D057386:Search Engine / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*
keywords: Google; Health communication; Health information search; Information retrieval; Medical informatics; Online health information