.

Home page

Text size

E-mail this page

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Condoms, coasters, dental dams, and posters are filling up the washrooms of various bars around town in an effort to promote safe sex.

Murray Dillman holds up two "Prevent Syphilis" coasters at Harley's Hard Rock Saloon on Wednesday. - Tim Edwards/NNSL photo

The 'Prevent Surprises' bathroom campaign was launched in mid-May by the Yellowknife Health and Social Services Authority.

"We're trying to do something preventative and you gotta go to where people are at," said Jo Russell, the authority's health promotion coordinator.

"We are looking at a target demographic of older youth, so that would be the 19-24 year old age range, and that also happens to be the age range that has the highest STI rates."

She said the program appears to be successful. Russell was at the Monkey Tree and Forty Below May 16 and most of their supplies were gone by the end of the night.

Crystal Dowbush , daytime supervisor for Harley's Hard Rock Saloon, said "they refill (the condom dispensers) every weekend, they seem to be going fast."

Dowbush said Harley's was on of two bars that participated in the pilot project for this campaign last year. The other was the Monkey Tree.

"(The health authority) wanted to see what kind of response they would get last summer, and I think they did it for maybe one or two months of the summertime, and at the end of the program they asked us if we'd be willing to do it again next summer and we said, 'sure,'" said Dowbush.

"With the syphilis outbreak and stuff like that, it's a good thing."

Russell said the pilot project was launched to find out what was needed to go citywide.

"We piloted this in two bars last year, and figured out from that how many resources we would need per week, and also what worked in terms of what resources to put out," said Russell.

One of the graphics the healthy authority chose for condoms cases shows an illustration of 'condom-man' fighting off syphilis underneath a slogan, "Prevent syphilis."

Russell around 7,000 condoms were purchased for the campaign.

"We are fortunate to be able to partner up with the The NWT HIV and Hepatitis C Support Network, and we got the funding through them to get all of these supplies," said Russell.

-30-