Helping global health topics go viral online

To maintain support for further investments into health research and prevent large groups of people from questioning modern science, researchers will increasingly need to master their communication of scientific progress in the 21st century to broad general population. The new generations, who inform and educate themselves online, prefer to make their own choices in what they view. This makes them vulnerable to many types of online misinformation, which is placed there mainly to attract their clicks. This evolving context could strongly undermine a consensus in the population over very important public health issues and gains. Therefore, we believe that it deserves to be recognised as a serious problem of our time that needs to be addressed. In addition to possible inaccuracies of the health information found online, the other component of the problem is how to make global public health topics and issues attractive for viewing online and engaging with. They need to compete with popular music, celebrity gossip, sports, movies and other forms of entertainment. In this issue, we bring a novel series aiming to explore effective strategies to promoting global health issues online and through other mass media, and reaching wide audiences.