About two years ago, Harold Wiesenfeld, medical director of Allegheny County’s sexually transmitted disease and HIV program, started hearing something from some of his patients that troubled him.
“They were volunteering that many of their partners were unknown because they met them through dating apps and it was anonymous,” he said. Apps like Tinder, OkCupid and Grindr that allow people to scroll through dozens or even hundreds of photos of possible potential dates in a given area within a matter of minutes.
Most troubling, though, was that many of those patients in his private obstetrics and gynecology practice at Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC believed they had contracted their STD from those anonymous partners they met on a dating app.
This occurred as Allegheny County was seeing a sharp and steady rise in cases of Gonorrhea (up 28 percent) and Chlamydia (up 35 percent) from 2006 to 2014 that concerned and worried health officials. Of even bigger concern is the rapid increase in just a few years of Syphilis, which is up 150 percent since 2009. Cases in that time jumped from 27 to 68 for the disease that can have long-term health concerns, particularly for women who want to get pregnant, and their fetus if they are pregnant.
It has become a big enough issue in Allegheny County, that in the last year, Dr. Wiesenfeld has made asking about the dating apps a standard question for his patients.
“Across the country we are in what we consider an STD epidemic, especially with Syphilis and its health implications,” Dr. Wiesenfeld said.
While some of the increase might be attributed to better screening and testing for the diseases, “many of us STD researchers are concerned with the popularity of these apps in facilitating more casual sexual encounters,” he said.
The county’s increase in STDs has risen steadily alongside both state and national rates [see chart with story]. It is teenagers and young adults 15- to 24-years-old who make up nearly all of the increase — an age group that is the target audience of dating apps.
But something else that many believe is playing a role is history — or, rather, forgetting history from the not-too-distant past.
“We’re trying to understand this about why people aren’t as afraid of STDs as before,” Dr. Wiesenfeld said. “Is it because they aren’t seeing people dying of AIDS anymore?”
The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s was responsible for the death of up to 40,000 people a year at its peak. But new infections began falling after it became more widely understood that safe sex could prevent infection — for both the gay and heterosexual populations.
That occurred not only as a result of education campaigns but through the deaths of celebrities, many of them gay men, that served as cautionary tales. But the publicity reached a wider audience still in 1991 when NBA basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson announced that he was HIV positive and had contracted it through sex from a woman. Syphilis rates dropped quickly in the 1990s, as did new HIV infection rates. Gonorrhea had begun to fall significantly in the late 1980s, too.
“I think [Mr. Johnson’s announcement] really just raised awareness about HIV and STDs,” said Loren Robinson, deputy secretary for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention with the Pennsylvania Department of Health. “It really got the message out about having safe sex.”
That lesson seems to have been lost on the younger generation, she said.
“Younger people think it can’t happen to them,” Dr. Robinson said. “Some of that is just a lack of knowledge but some of it is feeling invulnerable.”
Syphilis and Gonorrhea rates began increasing in the early part of last decade. Some studies found that gay men were contracting STDs through men they met on Craigslist as early as the late 1990s.
With even sharper increases in recent years, health officials across the country are looking for answers and wondering if the connection between dating apps and the sharp increase in STDs is as direct as it appears.
While there have been several studies looking at groups of gay men with STDs who contracted their disease from partners they met through dating apps like Grindr, there has not yet been completed a similar study for the heterosexual population.
Still, there has been enough evidence in Rhode Island and Utah that state health officials there last year put out warnings saying that they believed dating apps were responsible for much of the increase in STD cases. The British Health Association in England made a similar announcement.
Last year the AIDS Healthcare Foundation put up billboards in Los Angeles directly attributing the rise in STDs to dating apps, citing Tinder and Grindr in particular.
The dating app companies said it was unfair, but Tinder in January agreed to put a link to a search engine on its website that would find free STD clinics for users. Grindr posted information on its web blog about practicing safe sex.
As one researcher put it, warning users of their dating apps about the dangers of unprotected sex “probably wasn’t in their business plan.”
Tinder’s warning about safe sex and its free STD clinic search tool, for example, is difficult to find on its website. When a search is done in Pittsburgh, not one clinic address comes up, even though Allegheny County’s STD clinic at 3441 Forbes Avenue in Oakland is free.
Neither Tinder, nor Grindr, nor OkCupid responded to email requests for interviews for this story.
Dr. Robinson hopes they become more engaged in the issue.
“We want to find a way to use social apps for good, harvest them to do good, to spread information about STDs,” she said.
She would like to see the dating apps take seriously the ability they have not only to connect people, but to educate them about STDs as well.
“I think information is key, and I think that would be a good avenue for these social apps to pursue,” she said.
Several users of dating apps in Allegheny County, who agreed to speak to the Post-Gazette on a condition of anonymity, said it might be strange at first to see, say, a “Practice Safe Sex” message pop up when you’re trying to meet someone on Tinder or some other site.
“But that would definitely be a good idea for them to do some kind of reminder,” said a 26-year-old male Mt. Washington resident who has used Tinder and another dating app called Bumble. “That can be a tough conversation to have anyway, especially with someone you just met.”
But both he and another dating app user, a 27-year-old female Squirrel Hill resident who has used Tinder and Match, said they believe most people do try to navigate the dating app world in the same way they would a non-online date.
Talking about having safe sex with a partner “is never a conversation that is easy. But I don’t think it’s any different than in real life,” the Squirrel Hill woman said. “You have to be cautious whether it’s in person or online.”
The worry for Allegheny County, like all health agencies, is not just for the individual patient who tells them they contracted an STD from someone they met anonymously on a dating site. It’s for all the other patients that the person who gave them the STD might also be infecting without knowing it.
All three main STDs — as well as herpes and HIV — can be asymptomatic for months before the carrier realizes they have the disease and have been infecting partners.
The dating apps “make it hard to track partners and track the spread of the disease,” said Karen Hacker, director of the Allegheny County Health Department.
Dr. Hacker said one health colleague told her that in their county, there have been cases of people on business trips in town for one night hooking up with a partner. The partner got infected with an STD, but, with little or no contact information, it was virtually impossible to track the transmission carrier and prevent it from being spread to even more people.
The county last year held a meeting with community partners — from reproductive health clinics to homeless clinics and faith-based organizations — trying to get more people tested and spread the message about having safe sex.
“We are trying to broaden the partnership with these organizations and get testing out into the community even more and get the word out,” Dr. Wiesenfeld said.
Sean D. Hamill: shamill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2579 or Twitter: @SeanDHamill
First Published: April 3, 2016, 4:00 a.m.