Manhunt Cares » Site News http://www.manhuntcares.com Health Partnerships That Make a Difference Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:02:45 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Manhunt Cares Page: Better Sex http://www.manhuntcares.com/2011/09/new-manhunt-cares-page-better-sex/ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2011/09/new-manhunt-cares-page-better-sex/#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:08:04 +0000 David S. Novak http://www.manhuntcares.com/?p=5681 Manhunt Cares is proud to partner with the GMFA, the Gay Men’s Health Charity, to promote their innovative Better Sex for Gay Men campaign.

In this campaign, they’ve gathered some of best sex advice from lots of gay men on what can make for great sex.

It’s the stuff that they never taught you in sex education at school. They’ve also included tips that can help keep the sex you have safe.

Click on any of the topics below to learn more:

Jerking off/Wanking techniques

How to give a blowjob

How to receive a blowjob

Know your arse/ass for better sex

How to fuck

How to get fucked

Visit “Better Sex”

]]> http://www.manhuntcares.com/2011/09/new-manhunt-cares-page-better-sex/feed/ 1 Manhunt Cares Page: Open Relationships http://www.manhuntcares.com/2011/07/new-manhunt-cares-page-open-relationships/ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2011/07/new-manhunt-cares-page-open-relationships/#comments Thu, 14 Jul 2011 04:34:05 +0000 David S. Novak http://www.manhuntcares.com/?p=5567 If anyone has experience with open relationships, it’s Cole Maverick and Hunter. The Maverick Men—as known by their fan following at MaverickMen.com—are Boston-based porn stars who started their career at XTube, and after accumulating more than 80 million video views, created their own interactive website.

Cole and Hunter weren’t always porn stars. In fact, they used to be just your average couple with full-time 9-to-5 jobs. They each had busy work schedules, plenty of bills, and the same aspirations as any loving couple trying to make it in a big city. The problem was, they never got to spend time with one another.  Work interfered with date nights, vacations, and long mornings in bed together. They desperately wanted a change.

Visit “Open Relationships”

]]> http://www.manhuntcares.com/2011/07/new-manhunt-cares-page-open-relationships/feed/ 9 What do you think?: Criminalization of HIV Exposure http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/09/criminalization-of-hiv/ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/09/criminalization-of-hiv/#comments Sun, 26 Sep 2010 19:28:08 +0000 David S. Novak http://www.manhuntcares.com/?p=2569 xtra_logo

Beyond the courts/Criminalization of HIV

How do we stop the spread of HIV without dividing our communities?

Shawn Syms / National
A growing chorus of activists, civil-society advocates and community members has presented evidence that criminal prosecution of HIV-positive people only intensifies the thirst for retribution and blame and that the criminal justice system fails to reduce or prevent HIV transmission. But what’s the alternative to the criminalization of HIV? A complete overhaul of how we understand and manage sexual risk as communities, individuals and organizations, that’s what.
Throw it out the window
We need to untangle the web of misinformation that some people use to justify the criminalization of HIV. The common perception goes like this: HIV is extremely dangerous, inevitably fatal and easy to catch. HIV-positive people have an obligation to tell sex partners about their HIV status prior to any sex. It’s impossible to consent to sex with an HIV-positive person unless they tell you they’re positive. To this way of thinking, anyone who doesn’t disclose is dishonest, untrustworthy and probably addicted to barebacking. After all, if their grasp of moral responsibility were not so obviously lacking, they wouldn’t be poz in the first place. And someone like that wouldn’t think twice about passing HIV to someone else, on purpose. So you need to avoid these people like the plague and you need to slap them with criminal charges. Get them off the street. We need to throw this thinking out the window. Sex has never been risk-free for anyone, but safer sex is the absolute best way to avoid contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs) like HIV. Yes, HIV is different from other STIs because there is so far no cure, but HIV is also far more difficult to transmit.
Barry Adam, director of prevention research at the Ontario HIV Treatment Network, says reliance on disclosure to reduce transmission rates is actually dangerous. He believes the fear and anxiety caused by the threat of criminal charges may even lead HIV-positive men to disclose inconsistently. “Those who disclose inconsistently have higher rates of unprotected sex than those who either always disclose or never disclose,” said Adam at the symposium on HIV, Law and Human Rights in June. “People rely on others to disclose as a way to avoid having safer sex, rather than relying on this tried-and-true method of preventing HIV transmission.”
But the biggest difference between positive and negative folks is stigma and discrimination against poz people. It leads to a comparative disparity in social power between HIV-positive people and HIV-negative people.
“We still hear about people losing jobs, losing families, losing housing and occasionally experiencing physical violence when they disclose,” says Murray Jose, executive director of the Toronto People with AIDS Foundation.So while sex with poz people without disclosure is not necessarily very risky, disclosure is always potentially dangerous for HIV-positive people. So expecting disclosure under all circumstances is just not reasonable. Changing that is part of the solution.
Media and sex ed
Another part of the solution: the media has to change the way it reports on HIV and disclosure cases. Witness Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno’s histrionic coverage of the Johnson Aziga case.
“He cut a wide swath with his penis,” wrote DiManno.Bad media coverage “raises the spectre of gay men as diseased, predatory, and dangerous — out to kill, to take everyone with them in a debaucherous way,” argues Leanne Cusitar, a longtime sexual-health educator. We need mainstream media to report on HIV in the most rational, responsible and clear-eyed way possible. Avoid sensational, fear-mongering stories that only whip up hysteria. We need an informed society to fight against HIV and its criminalization but incomplete and inaccurate sex education leaves most Canadians with a poor understanding of STIs, including HIV. Furthermore weak sex education leaves too many kids to grow up without fully understanding their own sexual agency. They learn about sexual relationships instead through trial and error. Eight percent of teens who responded to this year’s Toronto Teen Survey hadn’t had any sex education at all, even though it’s a mandated part of the school curriculum. “It can depend on where they live, what school they go to, and the commitment of the individual teacher,” says Jess Abraham, a sexual health promoter with Toronto Public Health (TPH). And it’s not just teens. Adults need sex education too, education that is detailed and community-specific.
Changing public health
Canadian public-health departments are feeling a chill because of the criminalization of HIV. They are altering their best practices to minimize exposure to lawsuits. But they need a new approach and better funding if they are to better manage HIV risk and stop criminalization. According to Martin Duchesne, a health promoter with TPH, most interactions between public health and HIV-positive people are supposed to be helpful, like connecting newly positive people with primary-care physicians. But in some ways TPH is even more demanding than the Cuerrier decision. TPH’s sexual-health principles emphasize the importance of personal choice, but that doesn’t seem to extend to disclosure for HIV-positive people. TPH counsels every HIV-positive person to disclose their status to all sexual partners, even in the absence of risky behaviour. The Calgary Model, developed by the Calgary Health Region, is popular among advocates. In it less punitive strategies are employed against HIV-positive people who seem to insist on unprotected sex without disclosure. Only if those strategies don’t work do health authorities resort to more drastic measures.
Do something about it
As arrests continue to rack up, we need to rekindle the queer rage and sense of injustice that fuelled historic gay protests like the response to the Toronto bathhouse raids, the Gay CourtWatch movement to defend gay men against sex charges and the original AIDS activist movement. And we need a coalition of negative, positive and untested queers and allies to carry out this effort. Criminalization is an extreme manifestation of HIV stigma — and it shouldn’t be left to HIV-positive people to put themselves on the line to fight it. Success will mean meeting men who have sex with men where they are: including online. The virtual sex arena is a prime battlefield against HIV stigma. One service that plans to come out swinging against criminalization is Manhunt Cares (manhuntcares.com). Run by David S Novak, former national syphilis elimination coordinator for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the site links men who have sex with men with sexual health resources. Those resources will soon include information about criminalization and how to fight it.
Vancouver Coastal Health has used the site since 2006 to provide notification and counselling services to members whose partners test positive for sexually transmitted infections. Novak says only health authorities from jurisdictions with progressive practices against HIV are allowed access; those who advocate criminalization are shut out.
Change your own way of thinking
“I hereby declare that I deem every man I have any sexual contact with to have disclosed to me that he is HIV positive, regardless of what he says and regardless of whether or not the virus is now or has ever been in his body,” wrote Paul Leonard in his popular online blog. “This growing trend of criminalization fosters negative changes in how people, viruses and sex acts are conceptualized,” says Leonard. “Instead of a person infecting another person, we get a criminal victimizing an innocent person. The virus moves from being an unpleasant biological entity to being a weapon. The police — and, I fear, the public — begin to see a biological hazard rather than a  person. They start to talk and act as if the person who is HIV-positive is intrinsically dangerous. “I am responsible for my own actions. There’s no meaningful difference in risk to me whether I have sex with an openly positive person, someone who knows he’s positive but doesn’t disclose, and a person who doesn’t know he’s positive or believes incorrectly that he isn’t,” he says. Leonard’s assertion underscores the fundamental point that all people have responsibility for their own sexual choices. The fastest and most decisive way to end the criminalization of HIV is for HIV-negative people to stop making failure-to-disclose allegations to authorities.
If we want to create a world in which HIV-positive people can safely choose whether or not to disclose, and in which everyone is empowered to make healthy choices about sex, each of us has a role to play.
Dec 1 is World AIDS Day. Shawn Syms is a Toronto writer. He joined AIDS Action Now! at 18 and participated in the historic die-in at Toronto Pride in 1990.

Read the full version of this piece, published previously on Xtra.ca.

]]> http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/09/criminalization-of-hiv/feed/ 69 Decades-Old Laws Still Consider HIV a ’Deadly Weapon’ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/04/decades-old-laws-still-consider-hiv-a-%e2%80%99deadly-weapon%e2%80%99/ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/04/decades-old-laws-still-consider-hiv-a-%e2%80%99deadly-weapon%e2%80%99/#comments Tue, 27 Apr 2010 01:53:57 +0000 David S. Novak http://www.manhuntcares.com/?p=3945 The incident involving Darren Chiacchi, an equestrian champion, in central Florida, made headlines. The incident also raises a host of legal and ethical issues involving responsibility for revealing one’s HIV status to potential sex partners.

The statutes have been on the books since the early days of the epidemic. Most were enacted out of fear and anxiety, when it wasn’t clear just how HIV is transmitted and contracting AIDS was considered a death sentence.

Chiacchi led the U.S. equestrian team to the bronze medal in 2004. Authorities arrested the Ocala resident in January. He pleaded not guilty in February and is scheduled to go on trial in June. If found guilty, he could face 30 years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon.

Chiacchia and the unnamed boyfriend began dating in February 2009 after meeting through a gay web site. The boyfriend broke off the relationship after discovering medical records reporting Chiacchia’s HIV status. The state attorney prosecuting Chiacchia has declined to say whether the boyfriend, who was HIV-negative before the relationship began, has since tested positive for the virus.

The case is the latest in a string of incidents news media have covered in recent months. In March, prosecutors in Houston, Texas, decided to upgrade charges against a man accused of having sex with a 15-year-old boy to aggravated sexual assault This text will be the link with a deadly weapon because he has HIV.

In perhaps the weirdest case, a jury in Holland convicted two men of assault for attempting to infect 14 victims with blood containing the HIV virus in November 2008.

People who deliberately infect others with HIV (most people would consider monsters not too strong a term to describe them) date back to the beginnings of the epidemic.

Gaetan Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant whom epidemiologists identified as the notorious Patient Zero, traveled the globe and allegedly infected people in such early AIDS epicenters as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris and London. He told his numerous sex partners he had the “gay cancer” after exposing them to the virus.

Discriminatory – Except When Intentional
Experts EDGE interviewed were unanimous in agreeing that anyone who intentionally infects individuals with the HIV virus should be prosecuted, but they maintained that laws specifically targeting HIV-positive people are discriminatory.

“There are many things that are transmitted sexually that carry significant risk of death,” Dr. Stephen Boswell, president and CEO of Fenway Health in Boston, said in a phone interview. “Unless there are laws for every infection that you need to inform a partner about, it seems rather inconsistent to me that they would focus on HIV. Some of these risks are every bit as great.” He called some of the reaction to the virus when it was first identified in the early 1980s, such as the laws enacted, “outright prejudice.”

Such laws are unnecessary and have no proven deterrent effect, according to Bebe Anderson, HIV project director at Lambda Legal. The organization’s website lists the statutes in the 32 states.

Only some of them require HIV-positive individuals to inform sex partners of their status, Anderson pointed out in an e-mail interview. Others criminalize conduct whether or not the person informs a sex partner. Several criminalize conduct that poses virtually no risk of HIV transmission.

“Lambda Legal is opposed to laws that single out people living with HIV for prosecution or enhanced penalties based on conduct that would not be illegal if engaged in by someone who doesn’t have HIV,” Anderson said.

Rather than offering protection from HIV, the laws actually cause some harm, she pointed out.

“These laws serve to stigmatize people with HIV,” Anderson explained. “HIV stigma has been shown to have a detrimental effect on both HIV prevention efforts and treatment of people living with HIV. It leads some people to avoid getting tested, refrain from obtaining needed healthcare or forego antiretroviral medications.”

Media coverage of prosecutions makes matters worse, she maintained. “It tends to sensationalize the issue and creates a false impression that intentional transmission is a widespread problem, when in fact such incidents are very rare.”

While Lambda Legal believes such laws ought to be repealed, Anderson said she is not aware of efforts to do so.

Asked whether the organization has represented anyone accused of crimes because of their HIV status, Anderson reported that it has filed amicus briefs in a few cases, but none involving sexual conduct, and has given advice to criminal defense attorneys representing people with HIV.

Anyone who’s contemplating having sex with a complete stranger needs to deal with the issue of responsibility. How does one negotiate the shoals of having sex with someone you don’t know, especially in the heat of the moment? How much responsibility does the HIV-positive person have? How much responsibility does the other party have?

EDGE spoke by phone with Michael Weinstein, president of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the nation’s largest provider of AIDS/HIV medical care, to get some answers.

“If you’re making a decision in the heat of the moment either out of passion or are already involved, you’re very likely to make less wise decisions,” he said. “In a casual sex encounter, the person who carries an infection and has the ability to infect another person has the greater share of responsibility for preventing a new infection. It’s common sense to assume the other person is positive and take the necessary precautions against HIV and a host of STDs. No guidelines ultimately are going to decide who to trust.”

It’s common sense to always use protection unless you know your sex partner well enough and are engaged in a long-term relationship, Weinstein advised.

Many gays meet sex partners through the Internet. At least one company providing such online meeting places believes it has a responsibility as well–to educate members about precautions they should take.

Online Buddies operates Manhunt.com, the popular social networking web site that has four million members worldwide.

The company has what it calls an online health center (www.Manhuntcares.com) offering a plethora of information on resources, education, HIV testing, condoms and research.

David Novak is the senior pubic health strategist at Online Buddies. Before joining the company, he had been national syphilis program coordinator at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Manhuntcares.com “provides practical, relevant health resources and web links for interested Manhunt members and the GLBTQ community at large,” Novak said in a statement to EDGE. “Over the past seven years Manhunt has partnered with hundreds of non-profit community-based organizations and public health departments to provide individualized, local health information for the benefit of our members.”

Dr. Abigail Zuger, a New York City physician who specializes in infectious diseases, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece after the arrest of Darren Chiacchia that it’s time to get beyond blame for why people get HIV.

“Whose fault is a new HIV infection, really?” Zuger wrote. “Is it mine, for giving it to you, or is it yours, for being stupid and cavalier enough to get it?”

Peter Cassels is a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association’s Excellence in Journalism award. His e-mail address is pcassels@edgepublications.com.

]]> http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/04/decades-old-laws-still-consider-hiv-a-%e2%80%99deadly-weapon%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 Featured Video: Manhunt Cares Makes News http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/04/in-the-life-creating-solutions/ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/04/in-the-life-creating-solutions/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:09:06 +0000 David S. Novak http://www.manhuntcares.com/?p=3113 Source: IN THE LIFE

Creating Solutions

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOjzYgGPxYo

Watch the “HIV is Still a Big Deal” videos

]]> http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/04/in-the-life-creating-solutions/feed/ 9 AIDS.gov Blog: Using the Internet to Provide HIV-Prevention http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/04/using-the-internet-to-provide-hiv-prevention-messages-to-men-who-have-sex-with-men/ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/04/using-the-internet-to-provide-hiv-prevention-messages-to-men-who-have-sex-with-men/#comments Sun, 18 Apr 2010 12:10:00 +0000 David S. Novak http://www.manhuntcares.com/?p=3825 AIDS.gov: Using the Internet to Provide HIV-Prevention Messages to Men Who Have Sex with Men

By Miguel Gomez, AIDS.gov Director

On Wednesday, March 24, I had the pleasure of taking part in a day-long meeting about using the Internet to provide effective HIV-prevention messages to men who have sex with men (MSM). The meeting was sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

A report is being developed about the meeting (and we’ll work with the CDC to help share the findings/outcomes), but we thought it was important to let you know that the meeting happened and that the CDC is carefully and methodically working to understand how to best reach their target audiences. The objectives of the meeting were to: 1) discuss how the use of specific channels, technologies, or websites vary by important demographic and behavioral characteristics; 2) determine the strengths and weaknesses of specific channels, technologies, or websites for different types of HIV prevention messages; 3) discuss how points raised for 2 and 3 above could inform the development of electronic materials to inform, educate, and support MSM choices for different risk-reduction strategies.

After the meeting, I sat down with Jo Stryker, PhD, Associate Chief for Research and Evaluation at the CDC’s Prevention and Communication Branch of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention who explained that the meeting was part of a larger project aimed at developing the next generation of HIV prevention messages for MSM. “The overall purpose,” she said, “was to share lessons learned from internet-based HIV prevention strategies targeting MSM.”

The CDC invited a mix of people, ranging from academics to public health professionals to federal partners and industry experts:

  • Stephan Adelson—Adelson Consulting Services Inc
  • Lee Carson—Public Health Management Corporation
  • Patrick Hebert—AIDS Project Los Angeles and The Global Forum on MSM & HIV
  • Mary McFarlane—Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of STD Prevention
  • Dan Melton—npT Labs LLC and Chatreach.com
  • Paul Mooney—Fluid.com
  • Brian Mustanski—University of Illinois, Chicago
  • David S. Novak—Online Buddies, Inc. {parent company of Manhunt}
  • Jim Pickett—AIDS Foundation of Chicago
  • Cathy J. Reback—University of California, Los Angeles
  • Greg Rebchook—University of California, San Francisco
  • Francisco Roque—Gay Men’s Health Crisis
  • B.R. Simon Rosser—University of Minnesota
  • Bhupendra Sheoran—ISIS, Inc.
  • Dan Wohlfeiler—California Department of Public Health

What they all had in common, Dr. Stryker told us, “is their expertise in utilizing the internet and new technology to develop messages, interventions, and outreach strategies with a focus on MSM.”

“We need to make sure that we can develop messages that can relay the newest information to this at-risk population in a way that’s going to be clear and as personally relevant as possible, ”she said. “We need to make sure that we can harness the promise of the Internet.”

Dr. Stryker and her team are still compiling the information gathered at the meeting and are developing a report that will submitted to peer-reviewed journals and briefs that will be disseminated through the CDC website, as well as other channels, such as this blog. We will work with them to share and disseminate these findings in the upcoming weeks and months.

To learn more, listen the podcast of this blog post, which includes the complete interview with Dr. Stryker.

]]> http://www.manhuntcares.com/2010/04/using-the-internet-to-provide-hiv-prevention-messages-to-men-who-have-sex-with-men/feed/ 0 In bed with Hitler? http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/09/sex-with-hitler/ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/09/sex-with-hitler/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:35:42 +0000 David S. Novak http://www.manhuntcares.com/new/?p=1971 abcnews healthA provocative television ad ready to air next week in Germany suggests that when you have unprotected sex, you could be in bed with the devil himself — Adolph Hitler. AIDS Awareness group uses a Hitler lookalike in its newest ad campaign. In a shock and awe campaign that promotes December’s World AIDS Day, Saddam Hussein and Josef Stalin are also leading men in a series of highly sexual videos that surfaced on YouTube this week.

Read more, including what David S. Novak, Senior Public Health Strategist at MANHUNT, said about the video.

]]> http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/09/sex-with-hitler/feed/ 0 Confidential STD testing http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/08/manhunt-cares-in-the-news-confidential-online-std-testing-from-prnewswire-com/ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/08/manhunt-cares-in-the-news-confidential-online-std-testing-from-prnewswire-com/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:11:20 +0000 David S. Novak http://www.manhuntcares.com/new/?p=2090

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJTBqNg7O2o

Confidential Online STD Testing Clinic, getSTDtested.com, Introduces ‘Edu-Tainment” for STD Prevention as Social Networking Changes Dating Scene

CHICAGO and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., August 25 /PRNewsire/ — getSTDTested.com, the industry’s first online confidential clinic to use Web 2.0 technology that exclusively focuses on the awareness, testing, and destigmitization of sexual transmitted diseases, is launching a series of avatar and physician-based videos to help consumers navigate its website, learn from medical professionals and better understand their overall risks and testing options. Visit www.getSTDtested.com/manhuntcares & Read more.

]]> http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/08/manhunt-cares-in-the-news-confidential-online-std-testing-from-prnewswire-com/feed/ 0 Innovation and Action to End the Epidemic http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/08/manhunt-cares-makes-news/ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/08/manhunt-cares-makes-news/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:54:52 +0000 David S. Novak http://www.manhuntcares.com/new/?p=2016 CDC’s 2009 HIV Prevention Conference: “Innovation and Action to End the Epidemic”

By Michele Clark

The 2009 National HIV Prevention Conference Exit Disclaimer is reaching over 3,500 of our colleagues in Atlanta this week.

By Michele Clark

The 2009 National HIV Prevention Conference Exit Disclaimer is reaching over 3,500 of our colleagues in Atlanta this week. Thanks to conference organizers, this year’s highlights are shared to those unable to attend via Twitter: CDC NPIN Exit Disclaimer, AIDS.gov Exit Disclaimer, and others are tweeting with the hashtag #NHPC09 Exit Disclaimer. CDC also provides conference participants with text message updates Exit Disclaimer, and videotaped many of the presentations to broaden reach (CDC NPIN Exit Disclaimer should have these posted around September 7th).

Miguel GomezMiguel Gomez, AIDS.gov Director, presents at NHPC09

This morning, AIDS.gov Director Miguel Gomez presented on the plenary panel, “Advances in HIV Prevention Science and Technology.” The AIDS.gov presentation Exit Disclaimer focused on how the HIV community can adopt new media tools to further their work. Miguel said, “we have a responsibility to learn about new media—to learn what clients are doing online, what new media is, and how to fit it into our overall HIV prevention planning.”

Specific new media innovations were described after the plenary during an AIDS.gov-sponsored panel, moderated by Michelle Samplin-Salgado, “Voices from the Public and Private Sector on Using New Media in Response to HIV/AIDS.” Oriol Gutierrez, Jr., Deputy Editor, POZ Exit Disclaimer, shared his experiences using a blog Exit Disclaimer: Find the balance between personal and professional commentary and keep posts regular to sustain audience engagement. Erik Ireland, Digital Content Manager, San Francisco AIDS Foundation Exit Disclaimer (SFAF), discussed lessons of using podcasts to further SFAF’s mission Exit Disclaimer: Take the time to think about why you are interested in using podcasts and create ways to make it easy for people to access to your podcast. David Novak, Senior Public Health Strategist, Online Buddies, Inc. Exit Disclaimer, summarized STI partner notification Exit Disclaimer (PDF) and evidence-based online behavioral video dissemination on Manhunt Cares Exit Disclaimer in his presentation. Andrew Woodruff, Program Director, ISIS Exit Disclaimer, presented on ISIS’ experience using text messaging to reach youth with sexual health information Exit Disclaimer through SexInfo Exit Disclaimer and Hookup Exit Disclaimer.

Michelle Samplin-Salgado, Erik Ireland, Oriol Gutierrez, Jr., David Novak, Andrew Woodruff.Michelle Samplin-Salgado, Erik Ireland, Oriol Gutierrez, Jr., David Novak, Andrew Woodruff.

These experiences added to other innovative new media programs we heard about on a panel yesterday, “Learning in Real Time: A Hands-On Approach to Using New Media in Response to HIV/AIDS.” Here, Michael LeFlam, CDC, presented a comprehensive overview of new media tool use. Alex Barros, Alaskan AIDS Assistance Association Exit Disclaimer, presented about PowerON Exit Disclaimer—an Internet HIV prevention program designed to reach MSM. Francisco Roque, Gay Men’s Health Crisis Exit Disclaimer, talked about a web and video campaign targeting young MSM Exit Disclaimer. Dr. Marguerita Lightfoot Exit Disclaimer, UCLA, described the process of developing and implementing HIV prevention computer games for high-risk youth.

After hearing new media presentations—are you ready to translate ideas into action for your program? If you are at the conference, check out the Social Media Lab in Hyatt Room 219—a hands-on opportunity for programs to learn about using new media for their programs. We plan to share stories from the Social Media Lab after the conference.

Send us your comments to the presentations, and any lessons on using new media to reach your audiences with HIV prevention messages.

]]> http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/08/manhunt-cares-makes-news/feed/ 2 Healthier hook-ups from BayWindows.com http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/05/manhunt-cares-in-the-news-healthier-hook-ups-from-baywindows-com/ http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/05/manhunt-cares-in-the-news-healthier-hook-ups-from-baywindows-com/#comments Thu, 07 May 2009 17:17:31 +0000 David S. Novak http://www.manhuntcares.com/new/?p=2097 Who’s this guy and what does he have to do with healthier hook-ups?

Healthier hook-ups
by Ethan Jacobs
associate editor
Thursday May 7, 2009

David S. Novak brings to Manhunt his experience in developing online health outreach to gay men in his prior work at the Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
David S. Novak brings to Manhunt his experience in developing online health outreach to gay men in his prior work at the Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
(Source:Melissa Ostrow)

David S. Novak brings serious public health credibility to his new role as coordinator of Manhunt Cares, the men’s health offshoot of the Cambridge-based hook-up site Manhunt.net.

From 2004 to 2007, while serving as syphilis elimination coordinator at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), he literally wrote the book on online STD outreach to gay men, pioneering the department’s work in doing outreach to Manhunt members and authoring a guide on Manhunt outreach for use by other states and agencies. He moved on to serve as national syphilis elimination coordinator for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) where he continued promoting online outreach as a means to prevent HIV and other STD infections among gay men.  Read more.

]]> http://www.manhuntcares.com/2009/05/manhunt-cares-in-the-news-healthier-hook-ups-from-baywindows-com/feed/ 0