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Deb Levine has a quote featured in this excellent article by New York Times Sunday Styles writer Jan Hoffman. And her start in the field of technology and sexual health in 1993, Columbia University’s Go Ask Alice, is mentioned as well.
When the Cellphone Teaches Sex Education
Nicole Fineman/The New York Times
Published: May 1, 2009
THE special cellphone, set on vibrate, begins to whir. Throughout North Carolina, anonymous teenagers are texting questions to it about sex.
Karen Tam for The New York Times
TEXTERS Sally Swanson and James Martin are two of the experts who answer questions at the Birds and Bees Text Line.
“If you take a shower before you have sex, are you less likely to get pregnant?” asks one.
Another: “Does a normal penis have wrinkles?”
A young girl types: “If my BF doesn’t like me to be loud during sex but I can’t help it, what am I supposed to do?”
Within 24 hours, each will receive a cautious, nonjudgmental reply, texted directly to their cellphones, from a nameless, faceless adult at the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, based in Durham.
There goes the phone again.
“Why do guys think it’s cool to sleep with a girl and tell their friends?”
James Martin, the staff member who has text-line duty this week, is 31, married and the father of a toddling son. He hesitates. How to offer comfort, clarity and hope in just a few sentences? He texts back. “Mostly it’s because they believe that having sex makes them cool,” he types, adding, “Most guys outgrow that phase.”
The Birds and Bees Text Line, which the center started Feb. 1, directing its MySpace ads and fliers at North Carolinians ages 14 to 19, is among the latest efforts by health educators to reach teenagers through technology — sex ed on their turf.
Sex education in the classroom, say many epidemiologists and public health experts, is often ineffective or just insufficient. In many areas of the country, rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases remain constant or are even rising. North Carolina — where schools must teach an abstinence-only curriculum — has the country’s ninth-highest teenage pregnancy rate. Since 2003, when the state’s pregnancy rate declined to a low of 61 per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19, the rates have slowly been climbing. In 2007, that rate rose to 63 per 1,000 girls — 19,615 pregnancies.
In the last 15 years, school officials and politicians in many states rancorously debated whether sex-ed curriculums should mention contraception. Meanwhile, public health officials became alarmed about the fallout of risky adolescent sexual behavior and grappled with how to educate teenagers beyond the classroom.
A few universities and hospitals set up blunt Web sites for young people, like Columbia’s Go Ask Alice! and Atlantic Health’s TeenHealthFX.com, allowing them to post questions online. More recently, researchers have explored how to reach teenagers through social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube.
Now, health experts say, intimate, private and crucial information can be delivered to teenagers on the device that holds millions captive: their cellphones.
Programs in Washington, D.C.; Chicago, Toronto and San Francisco allow young people to text a number, select from a menu of frequently asked questions (“What 2 do if the condom broke”) and receive automated replies, with addresses of free clinics. Last month, California started HookUp 365247, a statewide text-messaging service. The texter can type a ZIP code and get a local clinic referral, as well as weekly health tips.
“Technology reduces the shame and embarrassment,” said Deb Levine, executive director of ISIS, a nonprofit organization that began many technology-based reproductive health programs. “It’s the perceived privacy that people have when they’re typing into a computer or a cellphone. And it’s culturally appropriate for young people: they don’t learn about this from adults lecturing them.”
The North Carolina program, with a $5,000 grant for the cellphone line and advertising from the State Department of Health and Human services, takes these exchanges a step further. The Birds and Bees Text Line offers one-on-one exchanges that are private, personal and anonymous. And they can be conducted free of parental scrutiny.
That lack of oversight is what galls Bill Brooks, president of the North Carolina Family Policy Council. “If I couldn’t control access to this information, I’d turn off the texting service,” he said. “When it comes to the Internet, parents are advised to put blockers on their computer and keep it in a central place in the home. But kids can have access to this on their cellphones when they’re away from parental influence — and it can’t be controlled.”
While some would argue that such programs augment what students learn in health class, Mr. Brooks believes that they circumvent an abstinence-until-marriage curriculum. “It doesn’t make sense to fund a program that is different than the state standards,” he said. (The State Legislature is now considering a bill permitting comprehensive sex education.)
As Mr. Brooks suggested, parents who believe these conversations belong in the home could cancel their teenager’s texting service (at possible grave risk to domestic tranquillity).
But they can’t exactly cancel adolescent curiosity about sex. At the very least, said Professor Sheana Bull, an expert on sexually transmitted disease infection and technology at the University of Colorado School of Public Health, “The technology can be used to connect young people to trusted, competent adults who have competent information.”
The Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, which runs the text line, has been helping to set up teenage parenting workshops and after-school programs around the state for 24 years, financed mostly by the state and by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The nine staff members who take shifts with the text line have graduate degrees in public health or social work, or years of experience working with teenagers.
Modeling their service on a similar city program in Alexandria, Va., the North Carolina staff members worked up guidelines: No medical advice — urge questioners to speak with a doctor. Do not advocate abortion. When necessary, refer questioners to local clinics, Web sites or emergency hot lines. Give reasoned, kind advice. Read answers twice before sending. No sarcasm.
The North Carolina center permitted a New York Times reporter to read through some phone logs, after cellphone numbers and towns were redacted. The questions span the spectrum of adolescence itself, from the goofy to the ghastly. Many ask how to talk with parents about sexuality. Combining a teenager’s capacity to cut to the chase with the terseness of texting, they are often brutally direct:
“Do I love her or do I love the sex?”
“What happens if you swallow a piece of condom?”
Some questions could have been written to teen magazines 50 years ago:
“Why don’t girls like short guys?”
“how do u move yr tongue when u tongue kiss?” (“Kissing is not a science,” the reply notes. “Go at your own pace and you will figure it out.”)
But many questions vault past the basic training manual: “I like boys but I also like girls. What should I do?” (“Some people just like who they like. … Only you can know for sure and only you know what is right for you.”)
Some reveal dangerous chasms of ignorance. Girls and boys alike ask about anal intercourse: Will it prevent pregnancy? Let a girl remain a virgin?
“If ur partner has aids,” one teenager asks, “and u have sex without a condom do u get aids the first time or not?”
Parents haven’t complained yet, perhaps because they haven’t seen the exchanges.
Sally Swanson, a staffer and mother of two teenagers, said if parents did read them, “It would highlight how much disconnected information kids are already getting at younger ages than we did.” The questions can be salacious. The staffers try to answer them all, said Mr. Martin, but discreetly and always urging protection. In offering this service to teenagers, he said, “you can’t say ‘I’ll be honest except or until.’ ” That’s often what happens with parents, he added, “when the child brings up something shocking, the parents tend to shut down.”
Last week, Ms. Swanson answered a flurry of questions from someone who finally identified herself as a 12-year-old girl. She texted, “Do u think its awkward txtin things about sex to kids?”
Ms. Swanson’s reply, in part: “I think communicating with teens in whatever way they need to ask a question is important.” Ms. Swanson gets questions about practices and body parts using slang that is unfamiliar to her. Her reference source: urbandictionary.com.
What pulses powerfully through the phone logs is the teenagers’ longing to unburden themselves. One night, as Mr. Martin was getting ready for bed, the cellphone vibrated. He read it and sat down abruptly. His wife asked what was wrong.
The texted question: “If I was raped when I was little and just had sex was it technically my first time when I was raped or when I recently had sex?”
He wrote three drafts. An hour later, he texted back: “Your first time is whatever you make it. There is no ‘right’ answer: I believe your first time can be many things (good, bad, fun, embarrassing, wonderful) but it should never be nonconsensual. Your first time is the first time you choose to have sex, not when some horrible person forces you.”
Professor Bull, the Colorado expert on technology and reproductive health information, says that such services have benefits but also limitations.
They are great for referrals and short answers to quick questions, she said. But unlike the California model, which can reach thousands automatically, these one-to-one text lines rise and fall on human interaction.
But it’s not an alternative form of therapy. Although some texters ask Ms. Swanson to reveal her age and gender, she refuses. “I don’t want them to feel connected to me,” she said, “because I’m never going to be real to them. I’m a texter. I want them to find someone real to talk to.”
Even so, the voices of an anonymous few, their thoughts floating across that text screen like a 21st-century Magic 8 Ball, haunt her.
A certain 15-year-old.
Last week, the girl texted that she had taken four pregnancy tests. Two negative, two positive. Which were wrong?
“I just recently moved in with just my dad,” the girl continued. “I can’t tell him.” She is an only child. The family has been through turmoil.
Ms. Swanson asked whether the girl could turn to other adults.
The teenager texted: “I talked to my sex ed teacher but she wasn’t much help. She made me feel ashamed.”
Ms. Swanson replied: “I am sorry to hear that. Please don’t feel ashamed. That won’t help anything and this situation certainly does not determine your worth as a human being. Life is full of twists and turns and difficult times — it’s how we handle them that matters — at least that is what I believe.”
Ms. Swanson promised to send her phone numbers for public health clinics in her area.
“Be easy with yourself,” she texted. “You’ll be O.K.”
The next morning Ms. Swanson texted her the contacts. “I hope these numbers can connect you with somebody who can take more time thinking this through with you.”
The cellphone vibrated in reply.
“Thanks.”
Ms. Swanson has not heard from her since.
 
Jaime Lebrija of ISIS spent a week in Washington, DC working with youth as part of Cable Postive’s YAMI-U (Youth AIDS Media Institute - University). The New York Times covered the youth’s fabulous multimedia HIV prevention campaign - NoLOLinHIV. ISIS implemented and is maintaining the text messaging component of this awesome campaign.
Fighting AIDS, Peer to Peer
Student Matt Hawkins described a campaign that he and other students created, intended to help fight the spread of AIDS among young Americans.
Published: May 11, 2009
By now, the concept of consumer-generated content, also known as user-generated content, has become familiar to the denizens of Madison Avenue. Asking the people who are meant to buy a product to produce ads for that product makes sense on many levels, even if opening the creative process to outsiders may bruise a fragile agency ego or two.
But what if the point of an ad is not to peddle a product but to change behavior? Who better to help determine the content of a public-service campaign than the intended audience for the message?
In that spirit, 17 students ages 16 to 23 gathered recently in Washington to create a campaign about H.I.V. and AIDS that would resonate with their peers, who account for such a large percentage of new H.I.V. infections worldwide. The multimedia campaign was produced in less than a week at a kind of creativity boot camp called the Youth AIDS Media Institute.
The institute was formed on behalf of Cable Positive, the AIDS action organization of the cable and telecommunications industry, with the support of the Motorola Foundation. Among those assisting the students as they worked on the campaign were the Watsons, a New York agency that is the agency of record for Cable Positive, and the filmmakers who founded Lookalike Productions, Lisa Lax and Nancy Stern.
The stuat Wprk dents who took part in the institute spoke to one another in conference calls before they met up in Washington in March to produce the campaign, which carries the theme “There’s no L.O.L. in H.I.V.”
(For those not hooked up to the grid, “L.O.L.” is computer-speak for “laugh out loud,” one of the many acronyms, abbreviations and shorthand expressions that are used in e-mail messages, instant messages, text messages and in composing the brief messages dubbed tweets on Twitter.)
The campaign reflects the eclectic media usage of its target audience. In addition to television commercials, which Cable Positive will distribute to cable channels and operators of local cable systems, there are a Web site (nololinhiv.org); presences on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube; text messages for cell phones (text “nolol” to 61827); and print advertisements.
The campaign features the students who created it, playing the parts of students who are misinformed, ignorant or in denial about H.I.V. and AIDS. They appear in a mock high school yearbook filled with portraits of class achievers, amended with telling remarks.
One young man is “Most Likely to Succeed at transmitting H.I.V. to his partner because he never got tested.” A young woman is “Best Actress for her performance in ‘I Have AIDS and Told You I Didn’t.’”
Another young man is “Best Dressed except for when it comes to wearing a condom.” And another young woman is “Prom Queen of thinking you can only get H.I.V. if you’re gay.”
The archetypes also include Class Clown (“thinking H.I.V. would never happen to him”), Mot Intelligent (“until she skipped her H.I.V. test”) and Most Popular (“until her partners found out they were infected”).
The idea behind the campaign is that “when you go to the communities you want to educate and give them the tools, you get a much better product,” says Sean Strub, president and chief executive at Cable Positive in New York.
The students who joined forces for the institute “were given a mandate to create a multi-platform, peer-to-peer education campaign for Cable Positive, which was their client,” he adds. “We provided the Watsons and technical help, and in six days they put together this terrific campaign.”
“The texting campaign in particular I love,” says Mr. Strub, who has long been active in the realm of AIDS issues, because “it’s reaching young people where you can reach them, on their hand-held devices.”
The text messages “use humor to focus them back on responsibility,” he adds, giving as an example one that asks, “What is a four-letter word ending with ‘k’ that’s about sex?” The answer: “Talk.”
“If I had my way, I’d have peer educators go into every high school in this country to present the campaign,” Mr. Strub says, “and invite the students to text in and sign up for it.”
“Growing up in Iowa, I think I had better sex education than a lot of schools offer today,” he adds. “There’s this gap generation deprived of some of the rudimentary stuff we’ve assumed they know.”
That is why the campaign takes the educational tack it does, albeit in a low-key, humor-laced fashion.
It may seem contradictory to use jokes in ads that declares H.I.V. and AIDS to be no laughing matter. But the students involved in producing the campaign “said, ‘We want it to be funny,’” says Paul Orefice, partner and creative director at the Watsons.
“They said, ‘We look at so much media all day, you have to pull out all the stops to get our attention,’ ” he adds, and the humor accomplishes that “in a fun and engaging way.”
The work that the Watsons handles for Cable Positive ranges from managing the organization’s Web site (cablepositive.org) to events to annual reports. “This time, I just kind of sat back,” Mr. Orefice says, laughing.
Actually, “I was blown away” by what the students created, he adds. “They’re so tapped into their peers, what it takes to reach them, to break through their complacency.”
He was so impressed, in fact, that there are plans for two or three students who worked on the campaign to become interns at the Watsons this summer.
The 17 students who composed the institute came from 4 community-based AIDS service organizations in the Northeast. Some previously worked with Cable Positive on local public service announcements; others have worked on text-message campaigns intended to reduce the spread of H.I.V.
“We used humor as our main approach to grab people who wouldn’t normally be listening to AIDS-awareness messages,” says Matt Hawkins, a 20-year-old junior at Fitchburg State College in Fitchburg, Mass. He was one of four students from the college who are members of the Teen AIDS-Peer Corps there and went to Washington to work on the campaign.
“I’m a communications major, studying mostly video production, and I got to use my skills working on the video production and graphics portion of the project,” Mr. Hawkins says.
“I would like to be doing video production one day and produce my own movies, if I’m lucky,” he adds. “Advertising, mass media, are definitely something that interests me a lot.”
Among his classmates and collaborators was Megan Benevides, a 20-year-old senior who is also interested in advertising as a career.
Ms. Benevides worked on the text-messaging part of the campaign, which she says engaged her “passion for English and poetry and communications.” She likened the text messages to the six-word short story that Ernest Hemingway was said to have written on a bet: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Ms. Benevides, a communications major with a concentration in photography, said the time she spent on the project “was perfect; it gave me a lot of direction.”
“Marketing can get bad press for being shallow, for being materialistic,” she says. “This was a positive way to use our skills we’re learning in school.”
The campaign the students created was on display last month at the Cable Positive booth at the National Cable Show, which like the institute was held in Washington. Already, Cox Communications, Suddenlink Communications and Time Warner Cable have requested the commercials, says Rob Feinberg, who works in account services at the Watsons and was among the agency’s staff members taking part in the institute.
 
Segment 4: Men’s Sexual Health
Listen to the California Report with Scott Shafer talking to Deb Levine and Jeff Klausner about men’s sexual health.
The California Report: Men’s Health
Guests:
• Deb Levine, executive director, Internet Sexuality Information Services, Inc. (ISIS)
• Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, MD, director, STD Prevention and Control Services Section at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Dr. Klausner is also an attending physician at an AIDS practice at UCSF-San Francisco General Hospital.
February 24, 2009 – 4:13 pm
Sex::Tech 2009 - Focus on Youth is all about marketing to youth to engage them in making change around sexual health - how to educate, inform and inspire youth to make good decisions about their own lives.
Oakland, CA (PRWEB) February 24, 2009 — Distributive Networks and Buckworld One are two of the powerful acts planned to present at Sex::Tech 2009 (http://www.sxtechconference.org). Hosted by Internet Sexuality Information Services (ISIS) (http://www.isis-inc.org), Sex::Tech 2009 will bring together researchers, academicians, healthcare professionals, technology companies and youth and youth advocate groups, for a two-day event packed with new research and insights on sexual health and technology.
Distributive Networks, creator of the text message initiative that anchored President Obama’s historical campaign, will present case studies addressing the use of technology for social change. Buckworld One, an electrifying theatre production group from Southern California, will bring together hip hop, spoken word, the use of digital media and krump dancing, to offer a provocative view into the world of the African American “exburb” youth community.
Sexually transmitted diseases are among the most common infectious diseases in the U.S. today, especially among our youth, escalating the need for innovative education and prevention solutions. The theme of Sex::Tech 2009 is Focus on Youth. Viral marketing, use of mobile tech, and pop culture/media influence are a few of the topics planned for discussion at this year’s event.
Additional featured speakers at Sex::Tech 2009 include:
- John Santelli, Columbia University
- Sheana Bull, University of Colorado
- Mitchell Tepper, Morehouse School of Medicine
- Philip Massey, UCLA School of Public Health
- Marion Howard and Melissa Kottke, Emory University
To register for the event, visit: http://www.sxtechconference.org/register.html. For information on sponsorships, contact Gabriela Aranda at (877) 665-2250 or gabriela (at) isis-inc (dot) org.
About ISIS
ISIS, Inc., based in Oakland, CA, is a nonprofit organization working locally, nationally, and internationally to develop innovative sexual health resources through technology and effective collaboration among corporate, public, and nonprofit sector partners for awareness, education and prevention programs that improve people’s lives. For more information visit: http://www.isis-inc.org/.
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Published: January 19, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — Steve, a health care worker in his 30s, had been told more than once that he had been exposed to a sexually transmitted infection. So when it happened again, he was not upset — even though this time he learned about it through an anonymous online postcard, e-mailed by a man with whom he had had sex.
“What was important was that I was being notified that there was a possibility that I may have been exposed to syphilis,” said Steve, who asked that his last name be withheld to protect his privacy.
The Internet has made it much easier to connect for sexual hookups. In response, public health officials have been exploring ways to harness the online world for conducting safe-sex education and preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases by alerting people exposed to them.
The e-card, which allows the sender to select the disease involved and includes links to public health sites and services, is part of that strategy.
“Notifying the person exposed to a sexually transmitted infection is the critical piece in preventing further spread,” said Dr. Susan Blank, New York City’s assistant health commissioner for sexually transmitted disease. “And as the reach of the Internet expands for use in finding instant sex partners, we’re using that technology as part of the solution.”
Along with eight other cities and three states, New York City has been working with inSPOT, the online partner notification system through which Steve, in San Francisco, received his syphilis e-card. (It is currently aimed at gay men but is expanding its audience to include heterosexuals, and plans to start a national site this year.)
The system was developed in 2004 by Internet Sexuality Information Services, a nonprofit agency in Oakland, Calif., with the support of health officials in San Francisco. Deb Levine, the agency’s executive director, said two factors in San Francisco led to the idea: the rise in Internet use among men who have sex with men, and an increase in syphilis among that group.
Research indicated that men with a sexually transmitted disease often failed to tell their casual sexual contacts about it.
“They did tell their partners, the people they saw every day, but they didn’t take the time to follow up with other people they were having sex with,” Ms. Levine said. “They said to us, ‘If there was an easy and convenient way to do it, we would.’ ”
In a parallel strategy, some public health departments have established online profiles on popular gay-oriented social network sites.
Through these profiles, self-identified health outreach workers are available to counsel men about safe sex and, when requested by members with a sexually transmitted disease, to electronically notify sexual partners they have met through the site.
David S. Novak, a public health strategist at Online Buddies, a company in Cambridge, Mass., said almost 30 city and state health agencies now had partner notification profiles on its popular gay site, manhunt.net.
Mr. Novak said that men who met on a social networking site often did not exchange e-mail addresses and therefore could not use inSPOT. Moreover, he said, because public health agencies confirm cases of infection before contacting sexual partners, their involvement reduces the risk that false information will be disseminated. “I think there’s room for both approaches,” he said.
Ms. Levine said inSPOT was intended to complement rather than replace the role of public health workers in partner notification, especially for easily treatable illnesses like gonorrhea and chlamydia. Public-health notification programs are aimed primarily at more serious diseases, in particular H.I.V. and syphilis.
Evaluating inSPOT is difficult, since the agency cannot measure whether recipients of e-cards have been tested. And Mary McFarlane, a specialist in sexually transmitted diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she wondered whether many of those who sent anonymous cards about crabs and scabies were playing pranks on friends. Still, she said, “if people are engaging in risk online, we need to engage in public health online and to make it as usable and feasible as possible.”
Dr. Kees Rietmeijer, director of sexually transmitted disease control at Denver Department of Public Health, which has an inSPOT site, said that because in-person partner notification was time-consuming and expensive, it was important to find other ways to communicate.
“Having said that,” he added, “as far as the effectiveness, the jury is still out. If you have X number of hits on the Web site, we don’t really know if that translates to people coming to the clinic to be tested and treated.”
More Articles in Health » A version of this article appeared in print on January 20, 2009, on page D5 of the New York edition.
 January 19, 2009 – 10:04 pm
By: Marian Wang
It’s a scenario that happens, but no one knows precisely how often. It’s a Friday night, and two teens are getting frisky. A condom breaks, and panic ensues.
In that moment of alarm, teens in California and Washington, D.C., can turn to their cell phones for help—via text messaging. “Txt 1 if ur condom broke. Txt 3 if s/he’s cheating on u. Txt 5 for STD info. Txt 6 if ur not sure uwant2have sex.”
Seconds later, there’s a response. If the condom broke, it says: “U may b at risk 4 STDs + pregnancy.” The message includes the name, telephone number and hours for a nearby clinic.
Each month, roughly 150 teens in San Francisco use this text message-based STD-prevention service. Of those, 40 percent text regarding broken condoms. The service is called SEXINFO.
Launched in 2006, it was developed in partnership with the San Francisco Department of Public Health and the Internet Sexuality Information Services to target African-American youth who are 15 to 19, a group considered high risk for gonorrhea and chlamydia.
Two years ago, SEXINFO was the only program of its kind in the United States. Similar programs have since developed in major metropolitan cities as advocates search for ways to spread HIV and AIDS prevention messages within the social networks of at-risk groups, such as teens.
People ages 13 to 29 accounted for 34 percent of HIV infections nationally, the largest percentage of any age group in 2006, according to the latest estimates available from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That report calls HIV “an epidemic primarily of young people.”
In October, text messaging programs began in Los Angeles. In December 2007, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention partnered with The Kaiser Family Foundation to launch KNOWIT, a national HIV-testing campaign where teens text their ZIP code to get the location of the closest testing centers. Two more text-based programs—one for California statewide, and one in Toronto— are expected to launch in spring 2009.
In Los Angeles, the new text message- based HIV-prevention program targets young gay and bisexual African-American and Latino men.
Unlike other programs, it’s not menubased, and relies less on public marketing.
Instead, led by a small group of teens, the program works to strengthen dialogue about health, wellness, relationships, homophobia and selfesteem within an at-risk group of 100 to 150 youths. It relies mainly on word of mouth, existing relationships and some outreach in clubs.
“It’s trying to reach a small group of young people to encourage dialogue,” said Pato Hebert of AIDS Project Los Angeles. “If you think it’s going to be plastered all over buses and billboards across the city for anyone to text, that’s not what our program is like. It’s a calculated experiment that we’re doing. It’s much more viral—pun intended.”
Washington, D.C., adopted a texting program in 2008 called RealTalkDC. In its first month, the program saw 625 unique text messages sent to RealTalk. Neema Enriquez of Metro Teen AIDS, one of the partner organizations that launched RealTalk, said that the organization distributed surveys to one of every three people they tested. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they saw material for Metro Teen AIDS’s campaign.
Of those who were aware of the campaign, 76 percent said it impacted their decision to get an HIV test. “It’s hard to say whether that’s all because of texting, because we were also doing other initiatives at the same time trying to get people to get tested,” Enriquez said.
“Young people are also the least likely to use healthcare, so we’re trying to reach them in the ways they communicate,” said Michael Kharfen of the district’s department of health.
Advocates of the Los Angeles programs say their operational costs are low compared with many other initiatives, and, in the district, Kharfen estimated its program costs $25,000 annually.
“I don’t want to undersell the value of the resource, but it is something we certainly think is a very worthwhile investment,” he said.
Youth in Chicago have yet to see any such programs. A 2008 Chicago Department of Public Health report shows that for the first time since 2000, people under 30 were the leading age group of those diagnosed with HIV.
Although city officials have encouraged youth to use text messaging for other purposes, such as reporting violence in schools, the city has yet to employ that tactic for HIV and AIDS prevention and education.
“We have been in talks about it. It’s on the horizon,” said Maude Carroll of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. “It’s great for reaching people who don’t have Internet access, and the technology is totally feasible, but we haven’t done it yet.”
Original Source: http://www.chicagoreporter.com/index.php/c/Sidebars/d/R_U_Nfected%3F Read More »
January 12, 2009 – 3:31 pm
Denise-Marie Balona |Sentinel Staff Writer
- January 4, 2009
For years, people have sent greeting cards via e-mail to celebrate birthdays or wish someone a happy New Year.
Now you can use e-cards to deliver a far less cheery message: I’ve got a sexually transmitted disease, and you should get tested.
For those who have an STD and don’t have the guts to tell a previous sex partner, the Florida Department of Health has a service for you. It’s free and anonymous.
Just go to inspot.org/florida and pick out a card.
Sure, it seems like an insensitive way to share such awful news. But Dain Weister, a spokesman for the Orange County Health Department, calls it a courtesy.
The discussion is so embarrassing, many just skip it. And that’s not good because it means people may not be getting the medical treatment they need and are unknowingly passing diseases to others.
Many STDs are on the rise in Orange County and across the state. More than 82,000 cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and infectious syphilis were reported in Florida in 2007, almost twice the number of a decade ago.
In Orange, more people also are being diagnosed with HIV, according to the state Department of Health.
Said Weister: “In a situation like this, it’s always preferred that people talk face to face. But not everybody can do that. The goal with this is, either way, to get people to come forward and get tested.”
Senders can pick from a variety of e-cards. For example, one says: It’s not what you brought to the party, it’s what you left with. I left with an STD. You might have, too. Get checked out soon.
Another says: I’m so sorry.
Internet Sexuality Information Services, a nonprofit group in California that helped develop the state’s Web site, introduced the e-cards in California in 2004. Since then, agencies in several cities and states have worked with ISIS to offer the service, Executive Director Deb Levine said.
Nationally, about 50,000 e-cards have been sent.
The cards appeared on the Florida Health Department’s Web site in 2007. So far, 3,745 people here have sent 4,847 cards.
ISIS promises anonymity — it doesn’t keep any details about senders or recipients. Though that cloak of secrecy helps people come forward, it also can aid pranksters. Fortunately, Levine said, there have been only a few reports of those.
Original Source: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/orl-stdcard0409jan04,0,79513.story Read More »
January 12, 2009 – 12:38 pm
January
NATIONAL NEWS: MySpace and Facebook support New York State legislation that will block sexual predators from social networking sites. Both sites voluntarily agree to help protect children from online predators. Are the laws really needed if there is self-moderation by netizens?
ISIS NEWS: ISIS hosts the first-ever conference on sexual heath, technology and youth in San Francisco, CA. Attendence was spectacular, with over 400 youth, parents, advocates, clinicians and educators participating. Winners from the Fresh Focus video contest – over 70 youth imagining the future of sex ed - were flown in for the plenary panel.
February
INTERNATIONAL NEWS: Half of UK men say they would give up sex for 6 months in exchange for a 50″ plasma TV. Later in the year, American women say they would rather give up sex than go Net-less.
ISIS NEWS: New York City Mayor Bloomberg mentions inSPOT as an innovative public health prevention tool in his State-of-the-City address. Josh, Andy and Deb attend Texting4Health at Stanford, with Deb delighting the crowd with a talk about usability testing and evaluation of education and awareness SMS projects.
March
NATIONAL NEWS: CDC announces that 1 in 4 young women have an STD. CDC was then admonished for conflating the stats - most common infection in the study was HPV, and not one young woman had HIV or syphilis. On another note, CherryTV.com launched - a new channel just for women about sex and sexuality. Just in time for March’s International Women’s Day celebrations.
ISIS NEWS: Andy and Jaime go to NTEN - non-profit technology conference in New Orleans. Present a fabulous, well-received talk about using SMS technology to reach youth (SexINFO).
April
NATIONAL NEWS: Jay-Z and Beyonce’s 2-minute sex tape is exposed (and distributed online). NO CONDOM - what kind of example is he setting when the HIV rates in the U.S. are highest among African-Americans? (See August news). Anyway, under 5 minutes is average for most couples.
ISIS NEWS: Andy dreams up the brilliant In Brief contest to design a pair of underwear with a safer sex message. Over 500 pairs of undies submitted. Posters available here. ISIS wins a Webby honoree in the mobile category for SexINFO. Article published in American Journal of Public Health about SexINFO.
May
NATIONAL NEWS: eHarmony offers memberships to people looking for same-sex partnerships (after lawsuit settlement, of course). Did you even realize that they only allowed heterosexuals on the site?
ISIS NEWS: UN Foundation/Vodafone report about Mobile Phones for Social Change showcases SexINFO. Allegra brilliantly hosts a full-house screening of Mark Schoen’s Sex, Film and Videotape at the Roxie in San Francisco.
June
NATIONAL NEWS: As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts are found to be expecting babies. The New Yorker does a great piece on the “red state-blue state” differences in teen pregnancy morals and prevalence.
ISIS NEWS: SexINFO hits the press again - International Herald Tribune and Yahoo! News. Andy and Allegra hit the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Non-Profit Institute with an STD prevention game for mobile phones.
July
NATIONAL NEWS: Child Online Protection Act (COPA) overturned. Thank goodness this Clinton-era law that would have forced websites with adult material to verify visitors’ ages was dissed. One quote: Anything not suitable for a 5-year-old would have required age verification - including reputable sex ed!
ISIS NEWS: Deb presents at CompuMentor’s NetSquared Net Tuesdays with Ben Rigby on Mobilizing Generation 2.0. Fun group of geeks, very interactive. Vacations rotated through staff!
August
NATIONAL NEWS: New technology reveals U.S. HIV rates higher than previously thought, exponentially higher among African-Americans and gays of all races/ethnicities.This needs to change the way we think about prevention and health in our society. Our underserved populations keep getting the shaft.
ISIS NEWS: Allegra and Andy go out to UCSF in San Francisco and Sacramento to showcase our contests. Rock and roll undies! Lots of follow-ups and meetings with folks like Jim Fruchterman of Benetech, Claire Thwaites of UN Foundation, and Jamie Hintske from the Alameda Co. Health Services Agency. Margs and Deb attend the Ypulse Mashup.
September
NATIONAL NEWS: New study finds “civic potential” around teen social gaming (Pew Internet and American Life Project and MacArthur Foundation). Miss Manners says it’s okay to set boundaries online.
ISIS NEWS: ISIS launches STDtest.org in partnership with SF DPH. Donation-based testing, results online for SF residents. Media coverage showcases satellite testing center at Gotham Tattoo parlor. Aspen Institute report on how mobile media can serve social good features SexINFO.
October
NATIONAL NEWS: Half of all US states refused federal Title V funding, rather than participate in abstinence-only-until marriage education programs. Woohoo! Time to end 15 years of abstinence-only funding. Go President-elect.
ISIS NEWS: October was insane. Deb goes to South Africa and presents at the MobileActive conference. Deb comes back and presents on a panel at Health 2.0 about Global 2.0 solutions. PloS Medicine publishes journal article on inSPOT (Deb, Andy & Jaime) and the next media frenzy begins (CNN, Today, MSNBC, etc.). ISIS releases survey with Ypulse and YouthNoise about young people’s search for health information online.
November
NATIONAL NEWS: President-elect Obama called for “age-appropriate” and “science-based” sex education in schools, starting in kindergarten. Go, go, go!
ISIS NEWS: New ISIS Board of Directors installed. Do you know them? They rock.
December
NATIONAL NEWS: 1 in 5 teens have sent or posted nude/semi-nude images of themselves online (4 in 5 haven’t). Another hysteria about what parents don’t understand — adults, talk to youth and find out what’s going on. It’s not that scary.
ISIS NEWS: ISIS announced Sex::Tech 2009 - March 22-23 in San Francisco. Deb goes to meetings at MySpace and Facebook - they are both awesome. NIH study of the impact of online social networks on HIV prevention for youth is prepared for early January launch (Just/Us).We are waiting eagerly for January 20th.
Looking forward to an awesome 2009!
Read More »
December 30, 2008 – 6:23 pm
  Sexuality Blog
By Cory Silverberg, About.com Guide to Sexuality since 2005
Monday December 8, 2008
 Following up on their smash inaugural conference last March, ISIS just announced registration for Sex:Tech 2009, their annual conference on technology, youth, and STD/HIV prevention.
Sex:Tech is an amazing opportunity for anyone working in the areas of sexual health, youth, or technology, eager to learn more about what’s out there and what possibilities exist for future work. It’s a crash course in the use of new and interactive technologies to improve the sexual health of youth and an unbelievable networking opportunity.
Not wanting to sound too much like a Hair Club for Men ad, I learned so much at last year’s conference and was so impressed with the work ISIS does, that I took a volunteer position on their board this year.
Here’s just some of what Sex:Tech 2009 is offering:
- Live interactive youth performances
- The truth about sex in video games
- Innovations in mHealth
- Sexual rights and advocacy for youth
- Hands-on computer labs and wireless access
Right now they’re taking proposals for papers and early registrations. There is reduced cost for youth and for adults who come with youth. Best of all, if you attend you’ll get to find out what “mHealth” is (I thought it was a typo)!
Learn more – ISIS: Sex:Tech 2009 Read More »
December 8, 2008 – 12:13 pm
 New York Times Technology Published: October 24, 2008
“The United States is far behind other countries when it comes to health care,” Deb Levine (Founder, ISIS), told the audience this week at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, CA.
“One of the United Nations development mandates is to use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as much as possible to move countries forward in their development. [But] because of the economic split in the U.S. between the small percentage of ultra wealthy and the large numbers of folks in need, Americans need ICT for health care just like folks in Africa, Asia and Latin America,” she said.
For a country that is considered one of the leading economic, political and cultural forces in the world, it appears that in the health care arena, the U.S. is still playing catch up to the rest of the world.
In 2004, the U.S. spent $1.9 trillion, an average of $6,280 per person - 16 percent of its GDP - on health care.
With one of the most expensive, yet inefficient, health care systems in the world, you have to know something is broken. Particularly when outside of the U.S., Health 2.0 is taking off.
So what is happening in health care around the world and is there anything we can learn from other nations?
Strengthening Health Communications in South America
The basic idea behind Voxiva was to provide a health care communication system to people with no Internet access. “While the Internet is great for people who have it, it wasn’t a reality where we were working,” Paul Meyer (co-founder Voxiva) explained.
The first system he created was for public health authorities in Peru. Using a telephone, physicians could enter details about a patient or disease and public health authorities could then access that data. Today, Voxiva works over telephone networks and can be accessed on all phones (mobile and landlines), as well as the Internet.
Over the past year, Voxiva has rolled out an entire suite of free services in Mexico, giving patients and doctors a better means of communication.
Lesson from South America: If you want to make a system that is useful, then make what people need. Don’t assume that everyone is going to have a phone, or the Internet.
Technology for Sexual Health Information
In 2006, when the San Francisco Department of Public Health contacted Deb Levine (ISIS) and said that a lot of people were getting Chlamydia and gonorrhea, she did what any other researcher would do: she went and sat down in front of Mission High School (San Francisco). “I was watching the kids, and realized everyone had a cell phone,” Levine said.
The ubiquitous presence of cell phones gave birth to the idea that became SexInfoSF, a text-messaging program that lets teens access sex health related resources by sending a numerical code for common questions.
While SexInfoSF is only one of the various services ISIS offers, in the main the company focuses on SMS text messaging. “There is no charge for this service,” added Levine, “you’ll only be charged if you don’t have a bundle for text messages.”
Lesson from North America: Work with the community to create culturally appropriate messages.
Monetization in the European Health Industry
Alensa, an e-commerce platform, was founded in 2005 as a way for European pharmacies to expand their retail sales by using the Internet after the company realized that very few pharmacies were online. “In talking with the pharmacists,” Alex Savic (CEO, Alensa) said, “we quickly realized the most important thing to them was to see a benefit.”
When Alensa created a health blogs network they knew that the medical practitioner bloggers would need to be compensated, so they came up with two ways to monetize their content, explained Savic:
- Premium posts: While the majority of the blog is available for free, Alensa encourages their health bloggers to have paid, or premium posts
- Widgets: by placing a widgetized version of a shop on their site, health bloggers earn revenue.
Lesson from Europe: The bottom line counts, but select monetization models carefully.
Managing Your Health Data in Germany
According to Thomas Liedtke (Head of Emerging Healthcare, ICW AG), 28-30 percent of patients are getting the wrong information.
Typically, he explained, this is the result of patients having more than one doctor; perhaps a physician, a neurologist and a gynecologist, all of whom prescribe different medicine.
ICW attempts to decrease this margin of error with their core product LifeSensor, a Web-based personal health record that enables data to be collected by and communicated to all interested parties, whatever their location. In a nutshell, it means that you get to manage your health data.
Lesson 2 from Europe: Let patients manage their health data.
England Looks After Her Own
According to Marlene Winfield, (Information Authority, National Health Service [NHS]), England’s universal health care program, the NHS, is trying to bring a number of services into one place; their goal is to enable two way communications between patients and physicians. What they’re working on right now is ‘Health Space‘ a personal health organizer that will be offered to every adult who wants it.
Using the system, Winfield explained, patients will be able to book appointments online, manage their medications, e-mail physicians through a secure channel, add any self prescribed medicine to the record themselves, keep a calendar of health appointments and get reminders. “It will give them access to a real time summary record that is being updated every time they do something,” she said.
This is a massive cultural change for a country that has had a national health service for so long and Winfield admits: “One of the biggest challenges is to get everyone to ‘keep the faith’ while we work through it.”
Lesson from England: Consider a universal health care program.
Of these lessons, which (if any) do you think would benefit the US health care system the most?
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November 6, 2008 – 5:39 pm
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