Officials of a clinical Web site say dermatological images used as references for doctors are being used by people looking for porn.
Dr. Christoph U. Lehmann and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore tell the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology that the Web site’s searchable archives of images are being misused by porn buffs, according to Reuters.
The researchers studied request patterns received by the site over a six-month period and determined that of the site’s 7,800 dermatological images, 5.5 percent involve the genital area, but 12 percent of the requests related to specific diagnosis of that region, while 37 percent of the requests for an anatomic site involved the genital area.
An examination of the top 43 referring sites to the clinical site showed that nine or 21 percent of them were from porn or fetish sites.
Lehmann and his colleagues concluded that “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.”
