What is outrageous is the response of the administrators. The school nurse raised an eyebrow after administering 150 home pregnancy tests to girls who were excited when they saw a “+” and disappointed when they saw a “-”. Her frustration, and subsequent decision to quit, was that the school didn’t offer contraception without parental consent. But these girls didn’t want contraception — they wanted to get pregnant! Where’s the disconnect?
Every moment like this is an educational opportunity. Not an opportunity to give away free contraceptives or a lecture about parenting, but an educational opportunity to help the young students open a dialogue with their parents, and begin to understand sexual communication, sexual responsibility, and the consequences of sexual activity, both positive (pleasure, belonging) and negative (STDs, HIV, risky pregnancies).
Girls who were coming in for multiple tests should have raised more than an eyebrow. The opportunity to open up the lines of communication between youth and adults around sexuality was missed. The opportunity to include the girls’ parents in the discussions was not only overlooked, but shunned. Once the pact was exposed, why didn’t the school nurse practitioner ask about parents’ response, find out that most young women thought their parents would be supportive and then arrange a health education event with all the girls who made the pact and their parents to have cookies and milk and sex talk?
That is the job of reproductive health professionals everywhere. To inform, educate and advise young people about how to communicate about sexual health… with their parents, with their partners, with their friends… so as to make good decisions that are consistent with young people’s own values, ethics and lifestyles. A tall order. But a better one that saying, “Do this, don’t do that,” and wondering why no young people are listening.
Via RH Reality Check, I’ve learned about the awesome SexInfo. Launched in San Francisco by Internet Sexuality Infomartion Services (ISIS), SexInfo lets teens receive health information via text message when they send numerical codes for common questions–1 for a broken condom, 6 if you’re not sure you want to have sex, and so on. While the texts require minimal effort on the part of teens, the messages they receive in response fully utilize the character limit. Responses include clinic addresses, hours and phone numbers, and a brief (often empowering) message to the teen, like “It’s ur choice 2 have sex or not.”
I can see huge potential here for libraries. According to RH Reality check,
Isis’ efforts to advertise the program ranged from flyers and bus shelter ads to getting a popular local hip-hop artist to help spread the world — but their community partnerships with clergy, juvenile justice groups, and health educators were particularly vital. They plan to spread the program, with variations, to DC and Toronto within the next year, and further after that.
How about community partnerships with libraries? The reference interview can be particularly sticky when it comes to medical information in general, with nervous patrons sidling up to the desk with a question like “Do you have any books on diseases?” when the real problem is “What do I do about this rash?” And for teens already feeling like they live in a fishbowl, asking about sexual health brings up huge issues of privacy and confidentiality. Ta da! Coded text messaging with quick, reliable results! I really hope libraries in San Francisco think to publicize SexInfo (discreetly, of course) in their young adult sections.
Now, I can already hear parental objections. With the popularity of websites like Teen Chat Decoder, it’s clear that some adults are getting freaked out by teen cell phone use. (My opinion? If your kid doesn’t feel comfortable talking with you about sexual health, you have bigger problems than figuring out the code.)
But if health professionals can use text messages to remind patients to take their birth control, couldn’t libraries be using text messages to send overdue and hold notices, or remind the youth advisory board about the meeting on Wednesday night?
In California, ISIS has launched a text-messaging program called SexInfo, which enables kids to use a coded text message to get resources. For instance, teens can text “1″ if their condom breaks, or “2″ to find out about STDs. And in New York, a group of obstetricians and gynecologists are testing the effectiveness of text and cellphone reminders as a way of helping women adhere to their contraception.
Last month, Kaiser Family Foundations and MtvU partnered to launch PosorNot, a virtual game and online community that helps erase the stigma around HIV infection. The game also spreads information on testing and resources for those who have the disease. It’s modeled, cheekily, after the degrading viral sensation “hot or not” — but that seems to have gotten the kind of attention a blander site might not garner.
These are just several examples of dozens of hotlines, websites, cellphone services and more that are springing up to spread sexual health information around the globe. Using technology to promote health education is hardly new, but as new media tools gallop across income groups and geographical areas, so do efforts to capitalize on them, particularly since the private but interactive nature of technology suits the issue of sexual health.
“Everyone has questions about their sexual health, reproductive health, sexuality, relationships. Everyone doesn’t have places to ask those questions,” says Deb Levine, president of Internet Sexuality Information Services (ISIS), who has been working to integrate technology and sexual health for almost two decades. “New media provides this sense of anonymity, comfort, and privacy, but at the same time people can really find community and discuss issues.”
Texting For Success
Levine and ISIS conceived of SexInfo when they noticed the ubiquitous presence of cellphones in California teens’ hands. They partnered with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and got local organizations that worked with kids to help with the process, as well as talking to teens themselves. In the first 25 weeks of this year, 4,500 teens accessed the service, texting in numbers that stood for particularly popular questions they had about sex, such as finding out about STDs or info on pregnancy testing.
Since SexInfo’s launch, ISIS has labored to make the interface simple and compatible with the media teens already love and the most pressing concerns they have, based on surveys done before the launch. “The most important thing is that we give them a place to voice concerns, to interact with them on their terms,” says Levine. “It’s not just experts answering questions, but experts saying ‘what are your questions?’”
Isis’ efforts to advertise the program ranged from flyers and bus shelter ads to getting a popular local hip-hop artist to help spread the world — but their community partnerships with clergy, juvenile justice groups, and health educators were particularly vital. They plan to spread the program, with variations, to DC and Toronto within the next year, and further after that.
The Buzz on Sticking to Contraception
On the other side of the country, a group of doctors at Columbia Presbyterian hospital recently conceived of a similar idea. Says Dr. Paula Castano, an ob/gyn at the hospital: “It was a combination of myself and other clinicians in our practice noticing when they asked routine medical questions such as when was your last menstrual period, patients would pull out their cellphones to check calendars.”
Realizing that patients were latching on quickly to new technology, Castano and her colleagues saw a chance to use the trend - reminders via cellphone - to prevent unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. They did an initial survey in 2005 to decide whether a clinical trial on the topic was feasible, with promising results. They surveyed women of all ages in four inner-city family planning clinics, a racially diverse group of women with incomes largely below the poverty level. They found that 77% of women under 20 used a cellphone, and almost 90% of those used text messages. The survey subjects expressed interest in the idea of text messaging as a way of helping them adhere to contraceptive methods.
Castano and her colleagues are currently working on a clinical trial to explore the usefulness of text reminders on contraceptive adherence, which isn’t easy for any woman but can be particularly difficult for women in distressed circumstances.
“Cell phone use is skyrocketing,” she says. “And even though users have gone up, the monthly bill has stayed the same.”
Challenging Stigma, Virtually
Using pop culture to endorse do-good initiatives is nothing new for the folks at Mtv U, Mtv’s college station. Their viral “Darfur Is Dying” game snagged the attention of their longtime partners at Kaiser Family Foundation, who hoped to do something similar with AIDS-related issues. The folks at Kaiser realized that their target audience had shifted the media they consumed, and are “not always watching TV or looking at billboards or listening to radio.” Rather, says Meredith Mishel, senior program officer at Kaiser, “they’re gaming.”
Kaiser joined forces with Mtv U and Poz magazine, the magazine for those living with HIV and AIDS, and sponsored a contest to design a game that would both combat stigma and spread health information. From the contests, the seeds for PosorNot, which launched April 31 with fanfare from pop artists like Will.i.am and Fall Out Boy, were sown.
PosorNot features a group of incredible people — Mishel is full of grateful praise for their courage and conviction — who have agreed to create surfable online profiles. Based only on appearance and a few initial details, participants are asked to guess whether these people have HIV or not, in the process learning to question their own assumptions about who is at risk for the disease. After they click through, users learn more about those who are affected by HIV either directly or indirectly, and are pointed to information about the disease and testing.
The relative security of the online interface, combined with the deeply personal experience of seeing human stories in front of them, enables a more thorough self-examination process. Younger generations tend to know there’s something inappropriate about voicing their own assumptions when it comes to HIV. But without voicing those assumptions, it’s hard to have them debunked — which makes the beauty of an online, anonymous game obvious.
But more than just fostering personal discovery, the site provides constant opportunities to send users towards information on getting tested. In just one April day, they sent the entire month’s sixth-highest number of visitors to the CDC’s HIV page.
“People are staying for a while, exactly what we’re hoping they’d do,” says Caroline Herter, a program associate at Kaiser.
Ring It Up
Clearly, the use of technology to spread health info in the US is on the rise in a major way. But in other countries, where poorer infrastructure leads to an increased reliance on cellphones — or where better technology introduced cellphones earlier — the implications are equally exciting.
The UN Foundation and Vodafone recently released a report including multiple case studies of groups using cellphones to improve health conditions around the globe. SexInfo was spotlighted as one such intervention, but their case studies included NGOs using cellphone technology in Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina and beyond. In these countries as well as in the US, the benefits from using technology are the same: efficiency, anonymity, a chance to explore the wider world, and interaction with already beloved technology. In the near future, the buzz of phones or pings of a new e-mail may offer more than a social hello — they can also provide vital, life-altering health information around the globe.
As wireless networks proliferate, the cellphone finds a niche next to the stethoscope as a medical tool
By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff | May 18, 2008
A text message a day might just keep the doctor away.
With more than 2 billion cellphones already in pockets across the world and wireless networks growing faster and more capable each year, mobile technology offers a powerful new platform to deliver healthcare.
Researchers are finding ways to turn the mobile phone, known as a medium for trivial interactions, into a serious tool. There are text messages that remind people to take medicine and measure compliance; cellphone snapshots that could help diagnose disease; and wireless technology that can create a live two-way video link, streaming the scene in an ambulance to a trauma team.
“A key to this is how do you deliver information, which is what a diagnosis is - at the lowest possible cost,” said George Whitesides, a Harvard University chemist who coauthored a paper in the journal Analytical Chemistry this month in which the simple camera phone turns diagnostic tool. “The problem, particularly in the developing world and at rural clinics in the United States, is you don’t have enough people - you can’t have a trained doctor travel 200 miles to do a simple test.”
Whitesides envisions the cellphone as a catalyst, helping bring expert medical opinions and tools usually avail able only at well-equipped hospitals and doctor’s offices into the field.
Special strips of paper could test for disease or contamination in people, livestock, and plants and then be photographed with a simple cellphone camera to replace more complex equipment. Minimally trained people in the field could collect samples and send results to experts who could use a pattern of colors to diagnose a disease and prescribe a treatment from afar.
In Whitesides’ study, researchers at Harvard and in Brazil proved the concept was viable, creating a strip of paper sensitive to levels of glucose and protein commonly used to diagnose kidney diseases, which they successfully evaluated by cellphone photo.
But the wireless infrastructure that cellphone companies have spent billions to build and maintain offers other opportunities, too. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Nokia Research Center Cambridge, researchers are using existing wireless networks to create technology that could link specialists and emergency responders.
Building a network to carry high-quality, two-way video would require extensive investment for a hospital, said John Guttag, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT working on the technology. But the problem with using existing wireless networks is already familiar to anyone with a cellphone: Individual networks have dead spots, and may be too slow.
The researchers devised software that sends a video much like what people see on television, but using infrastructure that already exists in a typical urban environment - a slew of different wireless providers. The software scans nearby wireless services and sends the data through a combination of the channels to overcome the limitations of a single network.
The researchers hope to deploy the technology in a field trial this year. A trauma team could use the technology to tell emergency responders to begin a course of treatment en route, or simply have a team of specialists ready when the ambulance arrives.
Already, some medical centersuse two-way video feeds to connect stroke patients at a remote hospital with specialists; but the technology could bring that expertise directly to the ambulance, which could be crucial for a condition where time is of the essence.
“The notion was could we do it just using the infrastructure that was already there,” Guttag said. “I don’t have to maintain those networks, the hospital doesn’t have to maintain those networks, and furthermore we know those networks are only going to get better” as technology and demand continue to progress.
Another team of researchers last month published a paper in the online journal, Public Library of Science ONE, showing that a Palm Treo 700W could be used with other equipment to image simulated breast cancer tumors.
The cellphone was used to transmit raw data from a biosensor to a processing facility and then display the results on a screen, opening the possibility of bringing medical imaging to people without access now.
Cellphone telemedicine offers the tantalizing possibility of expanding the immediacy, range, and efficacy of medicine in new ways, but business models will have to shift before such systems take off, according to Steve Tobin, a senior industry analyst at Frost and Sullivan.
Ultimately, he said, the challenge to new technologies will not be technological limitations, but the current healthcare infrastructure.
“The big thing that’s always plagued the telemedicine industry is reimbursement - the ability to get reimbursed and paid for service,” he said. “You’re looking at a new way to grab data in what’s really been an insular environment - inside the hospital.”
Even so, cellphones are already beginning to eke out a niche next to the stethoscope.
Partners Home Care began a pilot program using digital images to help diagnose wounds in 2002. Home care nurses took a digital camera on visits and nurses who had been specially trained in wound care could examine images of wounds.
But even with digital images, the process wasn’t efficient and could take days, according to Doug McClure, corporate manager for operations and technology for Partners HealthCare’s Center for Connected Health. The group began to experiment with phones.
“The mobile phone is really intriguing to us, just from an ease of use kind of handle. The way we’ve been able to deal with the mobile phone is all-in-one. Snap a photo, you can send it automatically, you don’t have to hook a cable into anything,” McClure said.
But ultimately phones carried by hundreds of millions of healthy people may offer a bigger opportunity.
Verizon Wireless last month said it would offer Pill Phone, a service that allows people to look up drug interaction over their phone, as well as schedule pill reminders.
SexInfo, a sexual health hotline aimed at teens in San Francisco, allows teens to find clinics and basic information just by sending text messages. Other researchers are eyeing text messages as an ideal way to send reminders to diabetic patients.
Researchers at the Center for Connected Health and local hospitals experimented with text messages to remind dermatology patients to apply topical medicine and test their compliance. To monitor patient behavior, they developed a special monitoring cap for sunscreen that sent a time-stamped text message to a server every time the tube was opened. Patients also received daily text messages informing them of the weather and reminding them to apply the lotion.
“An incredible set of services and connectivity are enabled by [cellphones], and we all are married to them now,” McClure said. “The opportunities for mobile phones are beyond imaging - it really moves to how do you get people to do a better job of taking better care of themselves.”
MILAN: Stories of cellphones’ helping people in developing countries abound - some of them highlighted by the industry, in an effort to polish its image, and others by users themselves.
There are the women in Bangladesh and other countries who invest in a phone and then rent it to fellow villagers, making money for themselves while providing a key service for others. There are the fishermen in India who have increased their earnings by calling from their boats to various ports to see where their catch can get them the most money.
But what about countries with advanced economies? Might cellphones have a nontraditional role there? Could cellphones help young people in the inner cities of San Francisco, Chicago, New York or London deal with fears about sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, for example?
Yes, according to a report commissioned by the Vodafone Group Foundation and the United Nations Foundation that looked at ways in which nongovernmental organizations use cellphones. The Vodafone Group Foundation, which finances disaster relief and preparedness projects, and the UN Foundation, created in 1998 with a $1 billion donation by Ted Turner, have collaborated on several communications-related projects in the past.
The report, presented recently in Washington, London and Brussels, profiles 11 organizations that have used cellphone technology to accomplish their missions, which ranged from sex education to dispersing emergency food to stopping fights between elephants and farmers.
The report looked at 560 nongovernmental organizations and found that 86 percent of the people questioned use cellular technology in their work, with those in Africa and Asia more likely to use cellular networks than their colleagues in areas with traditional telecommunications infrastructure. Ninety-nine percent of the people surveyed said cellular technology had a positive effect on their work, with 95 percent citing time saving as the key benefit. Three-quarters of those surveyed said an important advantage of cellphones was that they made it possible to connect with people previously difficult or impossible to reach.
Cellphone coverage is working its way to the farthest corners of the globe - 80 percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network - but it was in San Francisco, just up the road from where Apple designed the iPhone, that a small organization found a way to use cellphones to inform inner-city youths about the perils of unprotected sex.
This audience was hard to reach, according to Deborah Levine, executive director of Internet Sexuality Information Services, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California. So the group developed Sex Info, a service that lets people request information by anonymous text message.
For the price of a regular text message, users can ask questions and get immediate automated responses to queries. The responses include the names and addresses of clinics where people can be tested for sexually transmitted diseases and get counseling. More specific questions are answered by trained experts. The group publicized Sex Info in San Francisco beginning in April 2006, but a request by text message can be made from anywhere in the United States. A campaign to promote the services has just begun in Washington and it is scheduled to expand to Toronto this year.
In the first three months of this year, almost 4,500 requests for information were made to the service, according to Levine.
“Young people don’t always know who they can talk to and - like this - they can get that information on their phone, which they are using all the time anyway,” Levine said. “In most cases there is no cost for the users since many have unlimited text messaging plans with their mobile phone company.”
Levine said that the program was the first of its kind in the United States but that it was preceded by a similar program in London begun in 2002 by the Brook Advisory Center, a British charity. Brook’s service, which receives an average of about 100 text message queries per month, responds to questions about contraception, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
Internet Sexuality Information Services (ISIS) Exposes Ideas For Preventing HIV And Other STDs With An Underwear Design Contest
16 Apr 2008
Brickfish™, a social media advertising platform and Internet Sexuality Information Services, Inc. (ISIS), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting sexual health, are inviting people to design intimate apparel to help get the word out about preventing HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and developing lifelong healthy relationships. The “In Brief: What if Ur Undies Had the Last Word” campaign, located at http://www.undiescontest.com, invites entrants to develop their own art and slogans for boxer shorts, women’s underwear, or t-shirts containing a message about sexual communication, including preventing HIV and other STDs. The grand prize winner will receive a $1,000 scholarship or cash equivalent, and twelve pairs of underwear.
With recent statistics published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that one in four female adolescents in the U.S. have a sexually transmitted disease, this timely contest tackles this public health issue head-on. “Talking about HIV and STDs is uncomfortable, especially in the heat of the moment, so we are excited at this opportunity to create a forum for bringing prevention to the forefront,” said Deb Levine, executive director of ISIS. “The ‘In Brief: What if Ur Undies Had the Last Word’ campaign is designed to help sexually active people (and those thinking about having sex) communicate about the risks before they take their clothes off. We are confident the awareness raised by this campaign will encourage people to talk about their sexual health before they are in a risky situation.”
In addition to the grand prize winner, an ISIS expert panel of judges will award a $250 scholarship (or cash equivalent) for their favorite entry chosen from the top 100 generating the most buzz across the Internet. All people who vote or review in the contest will be eligible to win another $250 scholarship or cash equivalent awarded at the end of the contest as well.
The Brickfish marketing platform provides a forum to raise awareness of social issues through User-Generated Content (UGC). Brands, agencies and non-profit organizations use Brickfish’s patent-pending platform to launch online advertising and marketing campaigns that spark the creation of brand-focused UGC, such as blogs, images, video and audio. Brickfish’s content sharing tools enable anyone to view and review submissions, vote on their favorites, and share them with friends and peers through email, Instant Message and by posting on social networking sites, creating a powerful viral conversation that spans the Internet.
“The most important step to initiate positive change with societal issues is to get people talking and sharing,” said Hyder Rabbani, vice president, sales and business development for Brickfish. “The ‘In Brief: What if Ur Undies Had the Last Word’ campaign will help enlighten people about the dangers of unprotected sex and introduce steps they can take to protect their sexual health. We are excited about the opportunity to work with ISIS and leverage the power of social media sites to promote a critical message. We are confident this campaign will be a vital and fun way to increase awareness about STDs, HIV and unplanned pregnancy.”
Internet Sexuality Information Services, Inc. (ISIS) is a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to developing and using Internet technologies for sexual health promotion and to prevent disease transmission. ISIS provides leadership, innovation, educational resources and research in online sexual health promotion. http://www.isis-inc.org
About Brickfish
Brickfish, the social media advertising platform, has created a revolutionary new approach to consumer driven marketing that leverages the power of User-Generated Content and social media to connect brands with consumers. Brands and agencies use our patent-pending platform to launch online advertising and marketing campaigns that spark the creation of brand-focused UGC, such as blogs, images, video and audio. This content is shared from consumer to consumer via email, IM, and hundreds of social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and more. Campaign participants are rewarded for creating, voting, reviewing and sharing content, resulting in high-quality brand engagement. The Brickfish platform then tracks consumer interactions with this content and provides detailed analytics on campaign reach, performance and demographics. This results in a powerful viral marketing approach that has proven to be 5 to 10 times more effective than traditional online marketing methods such as display ads or search optimization. Brickfish uses a Cost Per Engagement™ (CPE™) model, in which advertisers only pay for actions taken with the brand.
The Vodafone Foundation and the United Nations Foundation released a new report on innovative uses of mobile technology by NGOs working to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals. The report identifies emerging trends in “mobile activism” through 11 case studies, and highlights the results of a global survey of NGO usage of mobile technology.
Here’s a taste of some of the findings from three of the case studies:
Cell-Life, a non-governmental organization based in Cape Town, South Africa, created its “Aftercare” program to work with the public health system and its health workers to provide home-based care for HIV/AIDS patients receiving Anti-Retroviral Treatments. Each Aftercare worker is assigned to monitor 15 to 20 patients. The worker visits the patient in his or her home, and in a one on one session discusses the patient’s current treatment. Using their mobile phones for data capture, Aftercare workers record information about patient medical status, drug adherence, and other factors that may affect a patient’s ART therapy. Aftercare workers then relay this information via text message to a central Cell-Life database. The data sent via text message reaches the Cell-Life server, where a care manager uses a web-based system to access and monitor the incoming patient information. The manager can also respond to Aftercare workers’ questions and provide supplemental information to improve patient care. The information collected not only facilitates individual patient care, but is also used to build a database of information on the severity and prevalence of the South African AIDS epidemic in these regions.
More examples like this after the jump.
EpiSurveyor
In 2002, Dr. Joel Selanikio teamed up with computer scientist Rose Donna to form the DataDyne Group, a non-profit dedicated to increasing access to public health data through mobile software solutions. Inspired by an earlier Centers for Disease Control product called Epi Info, Selanikio created EpiSurveyor, a free, open source mobile data collection software tool. EpiSurveyor offers health data collection forms that can be downloaded at no cost and modified by anyone with basic computer skills.
Through the pilot, thirty provincial health supervisors in Zambia and Kenya were trained in how to use EpiSurveyor on Palm Zire handheld computers. The health officers then used EpiSurveyor to collect management data about public health clinics–such as medical supply quantities and levels of staff training. In both countries, officers went beyond the purpose of the pilot to gather additional health data as new needs arose. In Zambia, for example, the supplied PDAs and EpiSurveyor software were used by health officers to conduct a post-measles vaccination campaign coverage survey–the very first time that such a survey had been independently conducted by in-country staff using PDAs.
HOW IT WORKS: EpiSurveyor incorporates a Windows- based “Designer” forms creation application, and a Java-based engine that can run on personal digital assistants (PDAs), smart phones, and soon, common mobile phones. Users start by downloading the software from the DataDyne.org website (www.datadyne.org). Then, using a desktop or laptop computer, they enter the health survey questions into the Designer program. The resulting form can then be published to a mobile device. For data that is collected via PDA or smart phone, once data is collected from the field the mobile device is synchronized with the computer. Data from multiple handsets can then be combined into a single data table for analysis.
And here in the United States SexInfo
It was while standing in front of the Mission High School near her home in San Francisco, California that Deborah Levine, executive director of internet Sexuality Information Services (ISIS-Inc.), a nonprofit she founded that develops “high-tech solutions for sexual health education,” conceived of a potential solution to a pressing public health problem.
Levine had recently been approached by the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) to develop a website to address rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases among at-risk youth. In 2005, rates of gonorrhea among African-American youth, ages 18 to 25, had gone up over 100 percent, with African-American women being infected by the disease at 12 times the rate of American women of Caucasian descent. With 85 percent of the city’s youth owning a mobile phone, a text-based approach simply made sense.
ISIS hired HipCricket, Inc., a mobile marketing firm in Australia, to program a service it developed known as SexInfo. Next came the task of working with mobile operators to provide mobile phone subscribers with access to the service. HipCricket offered to let ISIS-Inc use its five-digit ’short code’ during the project’s
start-up phase. Levine was then able to work through an aggregator in the United States to obtain the short code (61827) now being used to access SexInfo.
During the first 25 weeks of the project (April-October 2006), 4,500 individuals accessed the service, with 2,500 taking the steps to retrieve content and referrals. The top three messages accessed were: “What 2 do if ur condom broke,: “2 find out about STDs” and “if u think ur pregnant.”
Eight more case studies are examined in the report. And be sure to check out our interview with report co-author Katrin Verclas.
Teens have constantly been warned about online predators, but only a few may know where to turn to seek help and advice privately. Organizations who specialize in helping abused teens are turning to the Web to reach a generation that feels more comfortable opening up online than on a phone line. Online hotlines are booming as a result, as organizations reach out to Generation Y through social networks, SMS, and instant messaging.
Earlier this month, the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN), the nation’s largest anti-sexual assault organization, launched a secure instant-messaging hotline to counsel young people too shy to pick up a phone. RAINN president and founder Scott Berkowitz, said young sexual assault victims are turning to insecure chat rooms, blogs, and social networking sites for help not realizing the dangers of such actions.
To combat this trend, RAINN partnered with McAffe to build its web-based hotline from the ground up, thus providing people with a secure and anonymous place where they can chat privately with trained operators. According to the site, the Online Hotline does not capture a user’s IP address, nor does it record transcripts of sessions.
Another organization who has seen much success online is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, who turned to social networks like MySpace and Facebook. According to an article in USA Today, the organization now receives 20,000 visitors per month from its MySpace page alone. “One might say that if the Internet were a phone line, our site would be ringing off the hook,” says John Draper, Lifeline manager.
And what about cell phones? Teens love their mobile phones, and those seeking information about sexually transmitted diseases can request advice via text alerts from SexInfoSF.org. The site was set up by the Internet Sexuality Information Services, who also runs a service at inSpot that gives STD carriers a way to alert their sex partners with anonymous eCards.
I’m sure there are plenty of other online hotlines out there, so if you know of any, share them in the comments below.
How would you like to see a hot guy putting on your underwear? No, not the pair you just took off after getting home from the gym. The pair you designed.
We know you’ve seen all the seasons of “Project Runway” and think you could do a better job than most of those designers. So now’s your chance to prove it! The Internet Sexuality Information Services, Inc. (ISIS) is challenging you to design your own “fierce” underwear. And you could win $1,000!
And just like on “Project Runway,” there’s a little twist. Your design has to incorporate a safe sex message.
This challenge isn’t as difficult as getting guys in the heat of the moment to remember to practice safe sex. But, if you’re getting ready to pull a guy’s boxers down with your teeth and you see a handy little reminder staring at you, odds are you’ll remember to grab the condoms.
Enter often because there are numerous prizes to be won.
If you’re one who’s into structure and feel the need to know, or if you just want to see how far you can push the envelope, here are the complete rules and details.
ISIS, the people who previously brought you the Sex Ed Digital Video Contest, are hosting a new design contest focused on communicating about sex and risk reduction.
From the release:
The “In Brief: What if Your Undies had the Last Word…” campaign, located at www.undiescontest.com, invites entrants to develop their own art and slogans for boxer shorts, women’s underwear, or t-shirts containing a message about sexual communication, including preventing HIV and other STDs. The Grand Prize winner will receive a $1,000 scholarship or cash equivalent, and twelve pairs of underwear.
I’m getting a huge kick out of these ISIS contests, because they encourage a creative approach as well as requiring people to really think about the issue and condense it into something understandable and manageable. It’s sort of like those old speech contests in grade school, except much more interesting and entertaining.
Deb Levine, executive director of ISIS, had this to say:
“Talking about HIV and STDs is uncomfortable, especially in the heat of the moment, so we are excited at this opportunity to create a forum for bringing prevention to the forefront,” said Deb Levine, executive director of ISIS. “The ‘In Brief’ campaign is designed to help sexually active people (and those thinking about having sex) communicate about the risks before they take their clothes off. We are confident the awareness raised by this campaign will encourage people to talk about their sexual health before they are in a risky situation.”
The contest opened on April 3rd, and submissions will be accepted until 1:30 PM Pacific Time on May 15, 2008. Complete rules are available here. If you got to the “Enter Contest” tab on the site, you can also view and vote for current entries.
Posted by: Women’s Health News: Women’s health news, Information and resources from a medical Librarian
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