Facebook might eventually be the tool that makes or breaks the potential start of a relationship – by being able to inform you on whether your friend has an STD (Sexually Transmiteed Disease) or not. Yes sir, this is a possibility one day down the road, where the world’s most popular social network might eventually work on an app that knows who in your social circle carries what kind of STD. Peter Leone, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Infectious Diseases, has faith that Facebook, with its huge social range, is able to magnify the power of real-world social networks in predicting STD infection – and in the process, help prevent transmission.
Leone claimed that 20% of the partners of patients recently diagnosed with HIV tested positive themselves, and obviously this mean an increased risk of infection among sexual partners to their immediate circles of friends – which is where a social network like Facebook comes in, since folks in a similar social circle will most probably sleep with one another. Leone said, “When we looked at the networks we could connect many of the cases to sexual encounters, and when we asked who they hung out with, who they knew, we could connect 80 percent of the cases.” It would be just plain weird to update your status concerning your sexual health, though.
Filed in . Read more about Facebook.