PEP for HIV Exposure? A New Widget's Maiden Voyage

Post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP for short, is a course of anti-retroviral drugs that can reduce the risk of HIV sero-conversion after an exposure if taken in a timely manner. The guidelines for administering PEP have changed over time, and for doctors deciding when to go for it hasn't always been clear.

Now there's a widget to help!

The New York Times reported today about the release of a new tool to 200 emergency room doctors in New York State. The tool "walks users through a screening process to determine whether they are candidates for treatment, provides specific information about the 28-day course of antiretroviral drugs, and even links to consent forms in 22 languages, including Creole, Laotian and Yoruba."

The tool can be easily updated by the health department with changes in recommendations and statistics so that the doctors can always have the latest to go on. And with the critical window for PEP at less than 72 hours, its time that decision making is made easier. I'd be happy to see an evaluation of this trial period, and if successful, expansion to others states. Perhaps there are other health care decision making models that can be digitized. We'll see.

Underwear Design Contest launches!

What if your underwear really did have the last word? Too many of us miss the opportunity to talk to our partners about STD/HIV prevention and other ways of maintaining a rockin' sex life.

inBrief is an underwear design contest where you get to design your own STD/HIV prevention slogan or sexual health motto on a pair of boxers, underpants or a T-Shirt. The winning design gets a 1000 bucks and we'll make a dozen pairs of your design! You have until May 15th!

We've partnered with Brickfish to run this contest because (they rock) each entry can be shared in multiple ways. You can email entries, blog them, and bookmark them. This way, sexual health messages can take on a course of their own! Brickfish even maps how viral the entries become and you can follow their progress.


Cyrene, of Fresh Focus Video Contest fame made us this sweet animation. (Check out her previous work, "Sex Monsters"). Feel free to re-post this video. Click 'share' for the embed code. Or, steal our press release.

And now...start making undies.

Reuters inSPOT snowball - and that's a good thing

On Valentine's Day Reuters touted inSPOT as another tool in the tool belt for putting the smack on rising syphilis rates in New York City. We agree, it's a sharp tool indeed.

Quick to follow Reuters was the DC culture blog Heybeus who called us inSPOT creators "tech-savvy, crotch burny San Franciscan[s]." And we totally take that as a compliment.

And the snowball gained ground... another wink and a nod from Vermont and our own local wit, SF Weekly.

More buzz = more awareness about STD and HIV notification options = more responsibility taken!

Fries, Toast and Kisses

are but three reasons I love the French.

Another reason to tip our hats to the French is this amazing AIDS awareness campaign. Since I don't speak a lick of French the information I have is a bit spotty and colored by questionable google translations. The campaign seems to have started in 2005 with an animated short called Baby, Baby. The animation chronicles the sexual journey of one woman as she searches for the mythical "one". Along the way she freely experiments with sex and always protects herself. Next in the installment was Sugar Baby Love (which I've embedded below) in 2005 which follows a similar formula except it follows a gay man in search of love. The final installation is Love Stories (2007) and this time the main character is a straight man.



The great thing about all the animations is how condom use is integrated into the act of having sex. There is no awkward discussion, sex and condoms just go together. The animation never shies from its ultimate subject- how to have good and safe sex. Its explicit enough to be entertaining while managing not to show any 'bits and pieces.' (Of course its not perfect, I mean, why does the black internet date have to have a XXXL penis?)

The creators of the campaign, aides.org, have recently created a micro-site that houses all three animations www.touteslesrencontressontpossibles.com.
The site also has a funny chat room function that my lack of French keeps me from fully understanding. What I do know is that I can choose an avatar for myself from an array of undies (I went for briefs) and I could either chat on the beach or in a disco two of my favorite places.