Transparent health information in the media

When it comes to medical decisions, people have to deal with a wide range of information from different sources. Information from the media is a prominent example: It increasingly addresses health-related issues and communicates benefits and risks of medical treatments and prevention programs. Is the media a reliable and objective source of health information? To investigate this issue, we conducted a media analysis of the widely promoted vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV) in newspaper reports and Internet sources in Germany and Spain. These two countries differ in vaccination compliance rates and in the extent to which their health systems are directive. This chapter describes information categories in the media analyses. These categories included prevalence of cervical cancer and risk at baseline of suffering this disease, etiology, effectiveness of the vaccination, possible side effects, and costs. We compared media coverage and how balanced reports were in the two countries and investigated cross-cultural differences in medical communication.