Toronto To Experiment With Anonymous STD Email Notification, eh

I’ve got mail and, evidently, crabs

From The Star
By Megan Ogilvie

Imagine getting this note in your inbox after a night on the town: “Heads up … I caught an STD since we messed around and you might have too. Please take care of yourself.”

Toronto Public Health is hoping anonymous e-cards like this will help in the fight against sexually transmitted diseases in the city.

The provincial government’s AIDS Bureau is giving the city $60,000 to fund the online notification system, which was launched in San Francisco in 2003 to combat an outbreak of syphilis among men who have sex with men.

Since then, www.inspot.org has spread to five other cities in six states and more than 30,000 e-cards have been sent to 50,000 people. Toronto Public Health expects the Toronto portal at the same web address – in English and French – to be up and running here and in Ottawa by the end of June.

The main clients are expected to be men who have sex with men and who turn to the Internet for sex. Often the only contact information people have who meet in online chat rooms and through websites is an email address.

Tango’s Take
Maybe the Canadians are nicer than we are. Maybe they take their sexually transmitted diseases more seriously. Or maybe those sweet hockey-lovers are just naïve. But how is this a good idea? How is this not going to result in every college girl in Toronto getting bombarded with prank emails? While this is a great idea (in theory), it will be abused to the nth degree. “Dear So-and-So, thank you for the great sexual intercourse the other day. In hindsight we should have used protection (and not that helmet that you made me wear, hah!). I’ve got something that can only be described as three-dimensional and possibly sentient. Get yourself checked out. I’ve carbon-copied your parents.” Bad times.

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