Web may hold key to fighting new HIV wave

As infection rates rise among young gay men, the U's prototype website spreads a safe-sex mantra.

By JOSEPHINE MARCOTTY, Star Tribune

Last update: June 30, 2008 - 12:54 PM

At first glance, Sexpulse looks like a sexually explicit gaming website, with provocative pictures of nude men, cartoons and cheeky icons. But it's not a game. Far from it.

The website, in development at the University of Minnesota, is the newest strategy to slow a second wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic rising among young gay and bisexual men.

Infection rates in that population have increased by an alarming 12 percent annually since 2001, federal officials reported last week. What's different about that age group and that time period? The Internet, for one.

Gays and lesbians were among the first to create online social sites in the late 1990s. Like all such sites with their chat rooms and detailed profiles, places such as Gay.com and Manhunt.net have proven extraordinarily efficient venues to find sexual partners.

Experts debate whether the Internet is driving risky sexual behavior, but one thing is clear, they say: To stop the epidemic, they have to go to where those connections are being made -- which is less and less often in gay bars and neighborhoods, and increasingly online.

That's why Prof. Simon Rosser and others at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health are using a $3.5 million federal grant to create Sexpulse, a prototype for online HIV intervention specifically for gay men.

"If this is successful, it is huge," Rosser said. "We can flick a switch and make it available to every gay man in the world."

The implications, however, are far broader than HIV and the gay population. If it works, it could pave the virtual way to influencing all kinds of health-related behaviors -- from diabetes control to personal finance -- online.

Young and unaware

HIV and AIDS among gay men peaked in 1984. Then it declined.