Rummel: This is bad STD advice

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for avoiding awkward conversations whenever possible.

I always email instead of call. I’ve eaten food that was prepared incorrectly just because I didn’t want to confront a waiter about it. I’ve been cut in line so many times and instead of doing something about it I just stand there and seethe silently.

Sometimes, though, you really need to just bite the bullet and tell someone you might have given them a sexually transmitted infection.

I should make it clear, this isn’t something I know about from personal experience, but there is a reason I’m bringing this up.

Let’s rewind.

This week, I read this Q13 piece about how there’s significant increases in reported cases of STD’s in Snohomish County. From 2011 to 2016 reports of chlamydia, syphilis, and gonorrhea are up 40 percent, 112 percent and 243 percent respectively.

For context, this isn’t like a 15 to 21 type of 40 percent increase. In 2011 there were 1,762 cases of chlamydia in Snohomish County, in 2016, there were 2,475.

Q13 spoke to NeighborCare Health Nurse Clinical Practice Manager Rachel Wang Martinez about why this might be happening and how to deal with it. Most of her advice is really helpful for anyone worried about this, and if you live in Snohomish County or you’re planning on hooking up with someone in Snohomish County maybe you should be. But there’s one piece of advice Wang Martinez offers that’s a little suspect.

If you do contract an STD or an STI, she suggests you might use the website DontSpreadIt.com to anonymously let a former or current sexual partner know you may have transmitted something to them.

To test this system out, Jason Rantz gave me lice. But only digitally.

For the purposes of this experiment, Rantz sent me a message through DontSpreadIt.com informing me that I might have been exposed to pubic lice, otherwise known as crabs. The message also let me know that my time of exposure was “reported as 1 week ago.”

First of all, unless your partner is very sexually active with multiple partners, it really seems like they’re going to be able to trace it back to you. Especially if you give them a timestamp for when they were probably exposed, they’re almost certainly going to figure it out.

Here’s the second wrinkle: the receiver can reply to the sender if they’re willing to create an account on the website and pay a dollar. I, for one, would absolutely be willing to pay a dollar to send a exclamation-point riddled message calling the former partner a coward for trying to stay anonymous. But even this whole scenario presumes I didn’t already figure out who the person was and couldn’t contact them directly, which as we’ve established probably wouldn’t.

So, there’s really no winning with this thing. The best case scenario is someone pays a dollar to yell at you via text, the worst case is the person knows immediately who you are and you just end up looking worse because you tried to hide your identity.

I can write a passive aggressive Yelp review if my food gets messed up at a restaurant, I can shoot off a string of angry tweets about the inconsiderate guy that cuts me in line, but god forbid I ever give someone an STD, that’s not a conversation technology allows me to avoid.

Yet. I’m still holding out for a “Her”-esque artificially intelligent operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson that will handle all the conversations I rather wouldn’t.

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