Plan to track Bay of Plenty sex-infection carriers

More resources are being poured into the war against nasty sexually transmitted infections in the Western Bay, with moves afoot to launch a new service to track down people identified as being possibly infected.

In a new push to stamp out the spread of STIs, Bay of Plenty District Health Board has begun working on a centralised contact tracing service for the region.

The new service run through the DHB's sexual health clinic would give staff members more time to contact patients with STIs to either ask them to urge their sexual partners to get checked out, or hand over their partners' phone numbers so a DHB staff member could call them instead.

Public health portfolio manager Brian Pointon said the exercise could then be continued with that person's other sexual partners as a means to prevent further spread of infection.

"Contact tracing is already undertaken within the DHB, however, after mid-April we will be working to strengthen this process to reduce the level of STI's within the community," he said.

While the DHB is within its rights to approach people identified as possibly having STIs, strict regulations meant staff members could not reveal the patient who had passed on their contact details.

"The Bay of Plenty has high rates of STIs. Some STIs are also asymptomatic, so that a person may be spreading an infection without knowing it," Mr Pointon said.

New figures from the Institute of Environmental Science and Research revealed Tauranga had the country's second worst rate of non-specific urethritis between October and December last year, with 18 out of 467 men who visited a sexual health clinic testing positive for the disease.

Tauranga also had above-average rates of chlamydia - 152 of 2306 patients tested positive - and the city was near the national average for genital herpes rates.

In other efforts to improve sexual health in the region, the DHB is organising specialist training for Western Bay Maori health workers and investigating a pharmacy-based service to improve access to the emergency contraceptive pill (ECP).

"Further work is going into this idea at both a national and local level. In some parts of the Bay of Plenty at different times of the week, it may be difficult for a woman to obtain the ECP within the timeframe needed for it to be effective," Mr Pointon said.

"Making the ECP more readily available through a pharmacy rather than a GP, sexual health clinic, school health clinic or Family Planning clinic may improve access, especially for at-risk population groups."

But Mr Pointon said the pill was not a form of a regular contraception, but rather a "one-off emergency treatment".