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[Health information in the daily local press]
L Unzueta Zamalloa1, G Najarro Ajuria, I Mendíbil Crespo
1Centro de Salud de Deusto (Bilbao), Unidad Docente de Medicina Familiar y Comunitaria de Bizkaia.
Objective:
To know how much health-related information is published in the daily local press, type of information; pathologies; practical help offered, and sources.
Design:
Crossover descriptive study.
Setting:
Community.
Participants:
Health articles (events and publicity excluded) published in the newspapers of Bizkaia: Deia, Egin, Egunkaria, El Correo and El Mundo; sample included all issues from one fortnight of June and one fortnight of September of 1996.
Measurements And Main Results:
501 articles, which occupied 1.57% of the impressed surface, were published. 90% of the issues had health articles. 19.8% appeared in once-weekly health sections. Subjects considered as health culture were 49.9% scientific and technical information and 9.8% health habits and vaccinations. When compared with the rest of the newspaper, health sections gave more explicit advice (p = 0.04) and diferred in sources of information (p < 0.01).
Conclusions:
Health articles are almost daily published. The most frequent type was the spread of scientific and technical information. Current information topics are dominant. A few articles give explicit advice or referred to health habits. Acknowledgement of the sources could be improved. It would be desirable to investigate the quality of contents.