Availability of information in Public Health on the Internet: An analysis of national health authorities in the Spanish-speaking Latin American and Caribbean countries

Highlights • Access to reliable and quality health information and appropriate medical advice can contribute to a dramatic reduction in the mortality figures of countries. • 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%. • 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. • Wikipedia is one of the sources of information with the highest visibility when looking for information on leading causes of death, based on the selected search strategies, and constitutes a source of information for all the countries in which the search strategies were launched. The National Library of Medicine also got the same results.