YouTube Not Liking Health a Great Deal

YouTube is the biggest video sharing site in the world, there's no doubt about it, and because of that it gets billions of views every month. The queries submitted are various, ranging from those that still long for the good old days when porn was indexed there, to those that want to see the latest insight on Oprah Winfrey's show.

The downside to it all is that out of the numerous videos in every category, not all are according to the truth or real. There's a lot of leg pulling involved or even more serious, intended misguiding on behalf of those submitting the clips. This is the case that the University of Toronto has discovered about the vaccination process and the way it was portrayed on Google's video sharing site.

April Kemik, of EurekAlert, notes that "In the first-ever study of its kind, U of T researchers Dr. Kumanan Wilson and Dr. Jennifer Keelan analyzed 153 videos about vaccination and immunization on YouTube, a popular online video-sharing site. Researchers found that more than half of the videos portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or ambiguously. Of those videos, a staggering 45 per cent contained messages that contradict the 2006 Canadian Immunization Guide, which provides national guidelines for immunization practices. The Canadian recommendations are similar to guidelines from the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

It was strange for the researcher's team to observe that precisely the videos that were skeptical of vaccination were more viewed and received better ratings from the YouTube users, instead of those that showed immunization in a positive light.

"Health care professionals need to be aware that individuals critical of immunization are using YouTube to communicate their viewpoints and that patients may be obtaining information from these videos" says Wilson, senior author and an associate professor with U of T's Department of Medicine. "YouTube users also need to be aware of this, so they can filter information from the site accordingly", he continued.