When it comes to peeing in cups, Western students can proudly say their school is the best in the world.
On Feb. 10, as a part of #GetTestedWestern, a record-breaking 813 people were tested for sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
Within the span of 11 hours, Western broke an unofficial world record set on Valentine’s Day three years earlier in Basingstoke, England, when 767 people got tested.
Together with the Middlesex-London Health Unit, students were able to get tested for chlamydia and gonorrhoea, the two most common STIs for 15-24-year-olds.
This isn’t the first time Western has attempted to break the world record. In October 2014, the school broke a Canadian record after 516 people were tested in a single day.
“The first year we did it, students were slightly more hesitant, but this year, most students knew what we were doing and [were] more receptive to the event,” Morgan Mackenzie, the sexual health and consent education coordinator at Western said in an email.
However, breaking the record wasn’t the main goal of the event, Mackenzie said.
She explained it was an incentive to get people to come out and get tested.
“Doing so fostered a sense of competition for students, which helped with getting mass amounts of people tested,” Mackenzie said. “The main goal was to test as many people as possible and normalize [and] de-stigmatize the practice of getting tested to create a safer campus.”
In order to further encourage students to come out and get tested, the university’s Sexual Health and Consent Education Committee also provided free food and other prizes.
Getting tested for STIs is important, Mackenzie said, “because one in four college students have an STI.”
A 2013 report from the Public Health Agency of Canada found that chlamydia, gonorrhoea, and syphilis rates among young Canadians have steadily risen since the mid-1990s.
Patty Allen, a health educator with Carleton University’s Health and Counselling Services, said students should get tested whenever they start a new relationship or if they think they have symptoms of an STI.
If left untreated, STIs can result in long-term consequences such as infertility—especially for women, Allen said in an email.
“Women are also less likely to see a doctor if they become infected because many STIs exhibit no symptoms in women, and the infections are more difficult to diagnose,” Allen said.
Given the success of the event the past two years, Mackenzie said the university is planning on continuing to host it in the future.
“Although ideally I wish all students would get tested regularly for the sake of their own and others’ health . . . creating these extra incentives for students provides some with an extra reason to get tested if they are too scared [or] embarrassed to do so because of the stigma associated with STIs,” she said.
