Trying to stop the spread of the sexually transmitted disease, which causes genital lesions and stillbirths and makes people more susceptible to contracting AIDS, is labour intensive.
Street nurses walk the neighbourhood trying to find out who's sleeping with whom and then scour hotels and bars looking for their previous partners to persuade them to get tested.
—Amy Carmichael, "Syphilis outbreak out of control in Vancouver," December 22, 2003
TERRY GROSS: Fiona Gold is a
street nurse with the AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases prevention program run by the Center for Disease Control of British Columbia, the Canadian province that Vancouver is located in. She's been with the program for eight years: four as a
street nurse, four as a team leader. She still works with addicts on the streets of Vancouver two nights a week. I asked her to describe a typical night.
Ms. FIONA GOLD: Wednesday nights I usually buddy up with drug users in a certain part of Vancouver. It's the east part of Vancouver. And we head out. They have a needle exchange route that they do, and I go along as the nurse. And it's very interesting. I mean, we just run into users in back alleys, you know, hanging around the bus stations, that kind of thing. And very often—I think what's really important in working as a street nurse is that there's a lot of consistency; that you're just out there the same night, you're there again and again. And any outreach worker knows this but that you're there again and again because very often I think working with people who are struggling with addiction, you have to gain a certain amount of trust. And that trust comes from just being really straightforward, really honest with people.
—"Fresh Air," National Public Radio, March 1, 2004
Linda Manzon is a supervising nurse with the outreach program set up 2 1/2 years ago to provide AIDS prevention education and testing and counselling for HIV-positive people in three areas of Vancouver. The program has since expanded and its five full-time and one part-time street nurses purchase 20,000 condoms a month and actively participate in the mobile needle-exchange program.
—"Nurses Strike," The Canadian Press, July 3, 1990
