Rhode Island health officials say the increase in diagnoses is, in part, due to better and more frequent access to STD screening, but also because phone apps and other online dating services allow users to easily “arrange casual and often anonymous sexual encounters.”
This is not the first time government health officials have blamed dating apps for fueling rising STD rates. Last June, U.K. health officials reported more than 50 cases of syphilis across South Wales in the first half of the year, a rate that was nearly as much as all of Wales in 2013.
However, Dr. Brian Mustanski, a professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, has conducted research he believes demonstrates Rhode Island’s health department and other public health officials are, in fact, wrong.
A study he published in 2007 in the journal AIDS Care looked at the sexual behaviors of gay men who used online dating. In the retrospective analysis of self-reported questionnaires, he found that while seeking sex online was associated with greater numbers of sexual partners, one-night stands, sex without condoms and failure to discuss partners’ sexual histories, participants’ daily diaries indicated that unprotected sex was less likely to occur with partners who met online than with partners who met elsewhere.
Mustanski says his findings suggest that “men who engage in high-risk sex with other men use the Internet as a tool for meeting sexual partners, not that meeting partners online causes high-risk sex.”