ABSTRACT
This chapter studies how COVID-19 pandemic affected the awareness and search for information on internet about cancer in Brazil. To elucidate it, this work will analyse data gathered from Google Trends and observe the consumption of information about breast cancer and prostate cancer, during Pink October and Blue November in Brazilian internet, comparing three years (2017, 2018 and 2019) of data and the results from March to June of 2020 for these two terms in comparison with the term “Coronavírus”. We have discovered that, during 2017–2019, Brazilian users of Google have looked more about the addressed topics to the cancers campaigns. This means that, during the measured time, a high amount of news and data about the campaigns and the diseases were consumed. This is very important to the early diagnosis of breast and prostate cancers. But in 2020, Brazil searched a lot more about COVID-19, showing a loss of interest in cancer information. This means that the COVID-19 pandemic affected the 2020 cancer campaigns. The pandemic took attention away from the messages and actions used to prevent the types of cancers analysed in this work. The public, in a wrong way, could perceive that these diseases have “disappeared”.
