Using Search Queries to Understand Health Information Needs in Africa
Table 6: Relative topic popularity by user demo. for TB.
['[EMPTY]', 'Women', 'Ages 18–24', 'Ages 25–34', 'Ages 35–49']
Topic Popularity by User Demographics. As we did for HIV/AIDS, we looked at the topic popularity of the six topics of interest from the topic table in the main paper. As we saw in the HIV/AIDS data set, women and individuals in the 25–34 age group expressed relatively more interest in topics related to pregnancy, breastfeeding, and family care compared to men in the malaria data set. Additionally, for both the malaria and tuberculosis data sets, users in the 25–34 age group were relatively more interested in symptom-related topics. This is consistent with the literature that nearly half of all new HIV infections occur among the 15–24 age group. The 25–34 age group corresponds to the time-frame where these infections may progress significantly, and even develop to AIDS.