Careful the next time you poke a friend on Facebook.
According to a report at Salon, social networks might be the next frontier in the battle against sexually transmitted diseases. Since doctors already look to real-world social groups when tracking the spread of STDs, Dr. Peter Leone, professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Infectious Diseases, said that it’s only logical to extend those observations to a person’s online connections as well, especially since they’re all neatly aggregated on platforms like Facebook.
Of course, just because you’re friends with someone on Facebook, that doesn’t mean you’re sleeping with that person. But there is obvious overlap between Facebook friend networks and real-life friend networks, which in turn can correlate to the spread of STDs, Leone told Salon, citing a study performed on a syphilis outbreak in North Carolina.
“When we looked at the networks we could connect many of the cases to sexual encounters, and when we asked who they hung out with, who they knew, we could connect 80 percent of the cases.”
—Dr. Peter Leone
Even if researchers prove that Facebook is a valuable tool in tracking the spread of STDs, an app that assesses a user’s risk based on their friends’ status updates could still be a long way off. The social stigma surrounding STDs makes such an app a much thornier prospect than, say, apps and websites that tells you how likely you are to contract the flu, of which there are already plenty.
And setting aside privacy issues for a moment, it’s not certain that such an app would even be effective on a large scale. Human nature suggests that a person is probably much more likely to publicly complain about having the flu than to bemoan his or her latest herpes outbreak on Facebook.
That’s why when the Daily Dot newsroom caught wind of the potential Facebook app to diagnose your risk for sexually transmitted diseases based on friends’ status updates on April Fools’ Day, we were understandably skeptical.
“It’s the real deal,” Leone assured us. “Sometimes reality is as strange as the politics in DC.”
Photo by Sabrina.dent