Use of the Internet in STD/HIV Prevention.

The Internet has been identified as a risk environment for STDs, including HIV, for several years. Like the HIV epidemic itself, this online risk environment rapidly increased in importance, and revealed critical areas of the public health infrastructure that require new expertise and support. In the first section of this chapter, we will discuss the risk environment of the Internet, with most of the focus on men who have sex with men (MSM). The second half of the chapter will focus on the potential of the Internet for facilitating STDüHIV prevention, health education, outbreak awareness, and other public health interventions. In times of rapid change, public health officials often learn by trial and error in the interest of expediency, rather than taking the time to establish careful, scientific evaluations of new interventions. Such is the case with the Internet; thus, while we describe many Internet-based interventions here, we have very little data to support the feasibility, acceptability, efficacy, costeffectiveness, and generalizability of these efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]