Internet Health Resources for Hantavirus: Quality and Readability Assessment of Information on Websites

Background Hantavirus is an incurable, highly contagious, and fatal infection caused by rodent exposure. Although it can be prevented with precautionary measures and public awareness, there is no evidence regarding the quality and readability of online information on this subject. It is important to evaluate online sources as a DISCERN study to help improve public knowledge and safety in this regard.Objective This study aimed to evaluate the quality and readability of online health resources on hantavirus.Methods Search engines used were Google, Bing, and Yahoo. A total of 20 websites were considered from each search engine using the top search words from Google Trends. The DISCERN tool was used to determine quality and readability. Descriptive statistics and ANOVA analysis were performed to evaluate the results.Results The included 37 websites from Google, Bing, and Yahoo belonged to healthcare (48.64%), government (18.91%), encyclopedia (8.10%), medical authors (13.51%), and news (10.81%). There was no significant difference between the search engine choices regarding information content (p > 0.05). Their readability was 36.68/40 (±4.64), and treatment quality was 17.27/35 (±6.12). Overall quality of the websites was 3.87/5 (±0.89), scoring 25% excellent, 38.90% good, 25% fair, and only 11.1% poor in the DISCERN instrument.Conclusions The readability and quality of the first 20 websites about hantavirus searched from Google, Bing, and Yahoo were good and can be relied upon by users, as most of them were from healthcare, government, and medical author sources.