Online Hispanics Have a Hard Time Finding Health Info In Spanish

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How do Hispanics use the Internet to get informed on health issues?

A MediaPost Blog called Engage:Hispanics sought to answer this question and found that, despite a strong demand for health content online among Hispanics, there is very little of it available in Spanish:

According to comScore, Hispanic usage of health care websites is growing twice as fast as the general market. In September 2011, a total of 17.2 million Hispanics visited a health-related website; this represents 52% of all online Hispanics and an annual growth rate of 31%.

Compare this to the general market, where 66% of online users visited a health site in September 2010, up 15% from the previous year. The fact that most Hispanics are young helps explain why they are less likely than the general market to visit health sites, but language preference and the relative lack of Spanish language health information also seem to play a roll.

In the past 12 months, usage of health websites skyrocketed among the bilingual and Spanish-preferring online Hispanics. As a result, more than half of all online Hispanics visits a health site each month.

The blog entry indicates that there is a “clear demand for Spanish language health information online and relatively few companies providing it. Providing online Spanish health content would not only meet this demand, but it would also help Hispanics get healthy.”

Read more here.