Kickstarter of the Week is a regular series highlighting the technology, creative and innovation Kickstarter campaigns in Baltimore that might be worth your support. This week’s project comes from Indiegogo. See other Kickstarters of the Week here.
Twenty-five bucks seems like a lot of scrilla for a custom condom, but we promise it’s for a good cause.
SoTheyCanKnow.org is a website started in 2012 that people can use to inform their sexual partners if they’ve been diagnosed with a sexually-transmitted disease.
According to the site’s press release:
SoTheyCanKnow.org is a free website designed to help people who’ve been diagnosed with STDs tell their sexual partners. Users of the website can access information on how to talk to their partners themselves, or they can send anonymous notification e-mails to sexual partners that they wouldn’t otherwise tell. These e-mails are sent by the website and link recipients back to So They Can Know to find a clinic or doctor who will test them.
To maintain the website as a free service (as well as pass out promotional and informational materials to STD clinics and family planning centers), SoTheyCanKnow.org needs $25,000, which it’s presently trying to raise via Indiegogo.
Donate to So They Can Know’s Indiegogo campaign.
The website itself is a project of the nonprofit Sexual Health Innovations, founded by two graduates of Johns Hopkins University‘s School of Public Health, which “aims to use the Internet, and online communication, to tackle the STD problem in Baltimore,” according to the press release.
And what is that problem? Well, compared to national averages, the transmission rates of several STDs in Baltimore city are much higher: “Chlamydia rates are three times, gonorrhea rates are about four times, and syphilis rates are seven times their respective national averages,” says the release.
So … why a website? Data shows that partner notification, even anonymous notification like the kind SoTheyCanKnow.org facilitates, leads to a precipitous drop, in some cases, in the transmission rates of STDs.
Watch So They Can Know’s Indiegogo video:
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