With another record year for STDs, Minnesota calls notification essential

Tim Heymans has crisscrossed Minnesota the past 25 years, from Pipestone to International Falls to Winona, as an official state bearer of bad news: Telling people they are at risk for a sexually transmitted disease because a sexual partner has tested positive.

In one case he wanted to meet a widow whose dead husband had a positive test, but she insisted he deliver the news over the phone. “I asked her to promise not to hang up … until I said goodbye first,” he recalled.

Spreading warnings about STDs is a tough business — whether for trained state professionals such as Heymans or sexual partners who have just learned of their own infections. But in the face of another record year of STDs in Minnesota — the state on Thursday reported 24,599 confirmed cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis in 2014 — health officials said better and faster notification of sexual partners is essential to slow the spread of infections.

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/300088891.html