If all you ever read about gay people in Africa is in the western media (including gay media), you would be forgiven for thinking it's one endless horror story.

Southern California's adult film industry requires all performers to be tested regularly for sexually transmittable diseases as a safeguard.

British troops risk being infected with HIV as Taliban fighters are hiding contaminated needles with their bombs. Heroin syringes as well as razor blades are being buried in the ground by insurgents in Afghanistan so that they prick bomb squad experts.

EDIT: Since STDCarriers was spamming Newsvine, and hence removed from the site, links to that site have been removed from this article.

Yesterday I stumbled across a user account on Newsvine which had me wondering. The account is STDCarriers, and the name was immediately intriguing. So I followed the link to the website being described in the profile bio, and found STD Carriers Disease Control and Prevention Services.

The site explains itself as follows:

STD Carriers was founded as and still is the first public early warning alert system for identifying potential sources of incurable sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The International Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Carrier Registry is database driven list of people with HIV/AIDS, Genital Herpes, HPV, Genital Warts, and Hepatitis C. Our automated content management system (CMS) utilized the power of modern information technology to provide a real time information storage and distribution service that is fully operational 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

So basically, the idea is that if you are thinking of having sexual relations with an individual you can type their name into the site to see if they are listed as suffering from any of the above diseases. This immediately raises some flags for me, so I thought I'd bring a discussion here to see what other people think.

The body of a 44-year-old man is a bioterror weapon, according to a Michigan county prosecutor who is charging Daniel Allen, with "possession or use of a harmful biological device" for biting his neighbor during a neighborhood fight.

An AIDS advocacy group is bringing labor complaints against nine porn talent agencies for advertising actors who are willing to have unprotected sex on camera.