The most common STIs are spreading all too quickly among teenagers and 20-somethings. Yet, it’s entirely preventable. There are plenty of reasons for the rampant spread — a lack of education and resources, for starters. Public health awareness still has a long way to go. And it doesn’t help that the communities that need health awareness the most are often also the areas that don’t get enough education funding or that oppose sex education.
In 2016, the three most common STIs (chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis) reached record highs for the third straight year, according to the CDC. There were 1.59 million cases of chlamydia, a 4.7% increase from the record numbers in 2015. 63% of those cases were found in young adults ages 15 to 24, as were more than 50% of the gonorrhea cases. The fact that plenty of young adults are not getting tested isn’t helping. The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force recommends full STD testing for women ages 15 to 24, but only half that population are screened according to the appropriate guidelines.
Enter an unlikely advocate for STI prevention: artificial intelligence. A new AI tool called HEALER (a “hierarchical ensembling-based agent that plans for effective reduction in HIV spread) is using an algorithm to provide a unique solution. Essentially, this AI is helping spread information by targeting health-oriented community influencers. The goal is to increase public health awareness, and it seems like this artificial intelligence agent is having better luck than control groups disseminating similar information. (Looks like control groups could become obsolete sooner than we think.)
There’s a pilot program in Los Angeles that’s currently trying HEALER on for size. The HIV prevention program is primarily targeting Los Angeles’ homeless youth. HEALER is able to identify influencers within the group to spread awareness. Essentially, HEALER uses AI to start a word-of-mouth domino effect. If the influencer understands more about the spread of STIs, then the influencer can tell 10 people, who can tell another 10 people, and so on.
In this most recent pilot program, HEALER got information out to 70% of homeless youths identified by the program. A control group conducted in a similar span of time was able to get the same amount of information out to only 25% of that audience.
This Los Angeles pilot program is only the beginning. HEALER hopes to launch on a global scale, allowing this AI to keep effecting social change and promoting public health awareness worldwide.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.