Critical health literacy and the COVID-19 crisis

Applying critical health literacy has never been more needed than in these days when an infectious disease crisis arrives at a time of information excess and high expectations of controlling health. Public health personnel have generally assumed that knowing about the risk factors of infectious diseases has always been key to controlling and preventing an epidemic infectious disease ’s devastating consequences. What is different with COVID-19 is that we live in an age when expectations about mastering health—and here that means specifically, controlling risks of a deadly infectious disease—are higher than ever. These advanced expectations meet with another unique conditio n: never in human history has there been such an abundance of health information available from numerous more or less trustworthy sources.
Source: Health Promotion International - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research