Clinical web site may be target of porn seekers
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It seems that online dermatological images, intended as a references for doctors, are sometimes being used pruriently.
The idea that a searchable archive of clinical photographs was being misused first occurred to the site’s curators when they noticed a marked jump in queries for images of genital areas.
In light of this, Dr. Christoph U. Lehmann and colleagues, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, emphasize in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology that “anonymous misuse of collaborative archives must be anticipated, addressed and prevented to preserve their integrity and the integrity of the learning communities they support.”
The researchers assessed request patterns received by the site over a 6-month period, in terms of diagnosis, age group and anatomic site.
Of the more than 7800 dermatological images available on the site, 5.5 percent involve genital regions. However, 12 percent of queries for a specific diagnosis involved a genital area. Also, 37 percent of the requests for an anatomic site involved a genital region, and 12 percent of the 10,000 free text queries were for images of genitalia.
In searches that specified both an age group and an anatomic site, images involving children were 48 percent more likely to be requested than those involving an adult.
An analysis of the top 43 referring sites to the dermatology service revealed that 9 (21 percent) were pornographic/fetish sites. However, these sites only accounted for 14.3 percent of all 141,285 referrals.
The authors conclude, “Developers of online clinical image libraries containing potentially sensitive health information on topics such as sexuality and anatomy must be aware of issues beyond technical and domain knowledge.”
SOURCE: Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, April 2006.
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