STD E-Cards

For most people, the workday starts with a cup of coffee and a quick e-mail check to plan out the rest of the day, to see what clients and customers they need to contact or follow-up with, to get their daily horoscope or joke and perhaps to find out whether any recent sexual partner has exposed them to a sexually transmitted disease. Wait, what? A website called inSPOT has opened up an entire new avenue to help people who have recently been afflicted with a sexually transmitted alert their previous sex partners that they, too, have been exposed to the same STD.

At the site located at www.InSPOT.org, after choosing your location, you have a few options. The “Tell Them” option states, “Tell your hookups, ex’s, boyfriends, girlfriends, and partners they may have been exposed to an STD.” The e-cards range from apologetic - “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know I had STDs when we were together. You should get tested.” - to surprisingly flirty: “You’re too hot to be out of action. I got diagnosed with an STD since we played. You might want to get checked too.” Users of this web service can choose to send these e-cards anonymously or with a valid e-mail address. Recipients of these e-cards also choose their location and will be led to the “Get Checked” option to “find out where to get screened and, if necessary, treated for an STD.”

Co-creators of this web service, Deb Levine and Dr. Jeffrey D. Klausner, started this non-profit program almost 5 years ago in San Francisco where it originally catered to the gay community. Klausner remembers, “In 2001, I noticed a big rise in the number of syphilis cases among gay men. In 1998 it was about five cases. By 2001 we had 150 cases.” After a bit of research, Klausner discovered that the hefty rise in STD cases could be directly attributed to casual sex encounters set up between partners who had met online. It was at that point that Klausner realized a solution to this new trend could, ironically, be found online where the trouble began. After joining forces with Levine, the partners developed a non-profit organization named ISIS whose purpose would be to make information on sexual health easily available online. The STD e-card service was the very first program they designed and completed.

Since the program’s inception in 2004, close to 50,000 people have been recipients of the STD e-cards and the site gets approximately 750 hits each day. The creators of the program are proud of the fact that “click-through” rates are high. Click-through rates indicate those receivers of the e-cards that actually click on the link in the card and then click on links in the site to get more information about being tested. The ISIS project director, Andrew J. Woodruff states, “I think that is great. If you take 100 people, that is 20 who are finding out an important piece of information and being linked to services so they can take care of themselves. They might be 20 people who would never have known.”