can u help me to cure this one…pls..?

Maybe some calculations along the lines of ‘if you have unprotected sex with three partners you have a x% chance of contracting herpes.’

I’ve seen a poster aimed at gay men along those lines. It says something like “If you’ve had unprotected sex with eight men, chances are one of them was HIV positive.”

Personally, I’d be inclined to keep the scare picture, put an equivalent with a single small wart and a normal looking equivalent next to the scare picture, and state – all these people can transmit HPV to other people.

As for HPV it is a toughie as it is so incredibly common. I do think the HPV vaccine represents in important step in making the connection between cervical cancer and STDs (i.e. true prevention) and would love to see more discussion around the fact that it is down to HPV being so common that we’ve got population-based screening programmes for cervical cancer.

Then I saw the PSA Yul Brenner filmed shortly before his death of lung cancer. (Most have probably seen it, but if not: here.) As grossed out as I was as a kid looking at that poster, it had NOWHERE near the impact on me that Brenner’s words did when I first heard them in my 20s.

I know this isn’t a post about anti-smoking campaigns, but the difference in tactics is quite similar and I thought it worth noting. Some people will respond better to the blatant shock value of a repulsive image; others will need something more sobering and subtle in order to relate to the matter at hand. As long as both are proven to be effective, they are valid methods of conveying a serious message and need to continue in order for the message to be received by the greatest number of people.

Frankly, I’m not too concerned about attaching a stigma to individuals with STDs through the use of such slideshows. The same argument could be made against those ubiquitous posters of a smoker’s lung, but those aren’t going away any time soon.

But even if those images are somewhat exploitative, it’s more important to startle teens into smart behavior. And unfortunately, I don’t believe most teens would appreciate the message behind subtler images like the final one posted above. I can hear my kid nephew scoffing, “So what, am I supposed to act like EVERY girl I meet has an STD?” Well…yeah.

However, I do think that images of healthy-looking people rather than just a close-up of diseased genitalia have the potential to be very effective in reinforcing smart sex practices in adults. They are probably more likely to brush off that memory of grotesque genitalia when it’s a decade old and they are presented with a perfectly unblemished specimen. So such a PSA campaign would be a sobering reminder and a new way to relate to what the Cavalcade of Venereal Disease first taught them in high school health class.