The billboards feature a menacing iceberg, sinking ship and an all-caps message: GONORRHEA ALERT!
What do an iceberg and sinking ship have to do with a sexually transmitted disease? It’s not immediately clear, but the billboards on Boren Avenue and near the Space Needle likely caught your eye. And that’s the point.
“There is a sense of desensitization when it comes to STIs (sexually transmitted infections), and billboards go a long way toward someone Googling something or scheduling something with a provider,” said Marcelino Alcorta, of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
“There’s also value in asking a question, and if they’re among friends, hopefully there is someone among their friend group who could start a conversation.”
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is behind the new billboards, displaying the alert in 23 cities across a dozen states where the organization operates wellness centers and treatment clinics.
Though the images are focused on drug-resistant gonorrhea, they’re part of a larger outreach campaign aimed at queer communities and communities of color as a means of addressing health equity, said Alcorta, the foundation’s western region director.
Gonorrhea is transmitted through sexual contact and is among the most common STDs in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cases in King County have doubled in the past decade and are rising, mirroring trends throughout the country, according to data from Public Health – Seattle & King County. Last year, there were 46,368 cases of gonorrhea; slightly more than half were among men who have sex with men, according to the health department.
Symptoms include painful urination, increased or white, yellow or green discharge, and pain, though many people who have it are asymptomatic. Treatment is usually an injection of an antibiotic, though gonorrhea has progressively grown resistant to antibiotic drugs, which is important for the public to know, Alcorta said.
“We’re kind of on our last legs when it comes to antibiotics, and we need to do more to address sexual health” he said.
The billboards direct viewers to freestdcheck.org, which has more information on sexual health and AHF’s wellness center. The Seattle wellness center is on Capitol Hill and offers doctors visits, STD clinic and testing center, and HIV testing center.
The CDC recommends sexually active gay or bisexual men get tested annually for gonorrhea, and that women younger than 25 or older with new or multiple sex partners also get tested once a year. If left untreated, gonorrhea can increase the risk of HIV for anyone and infertility in women.
As for the billboards, Alcorta admits even he was a little confused when he saw them. A marketing department member said the idea is the risk of diseases like gonorrhea may not seem harmful on the surface, but there can be a much bigger danger than perceived.
Plus, they’re eye-catching, and likely too difficult a word for the youngest viewers to decipher, so no questions of “What’s gonorrhea?” — though that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, Alcorta added.
“I grew up in Texas, where we didn’t talk about this,” he said. “The ability to ask those questions early on in life would have been life-changing.”
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