Wellness Fair and Pleasure Party combine successfully

The annual Wellness Fair and Pleasure Party, sponsored chiefly by the Health Promotion Office, were successes this year, drawing much larger crowds and attracting much more interest this year than in years past. The Wellness Fair was held at the Pit in Wilson Commons, and the Pleasure Party was held in Hirst Lounge on Wednesday, Feb. 4, from 11:30 a.m. until almost 2 p.m. Mary-Beth Dreyer, a health educator at the HPO, compared the Fair and Party this year favorably to others. “I’m impressed with the turnout,” she said. “There are a lot of student-run tables and a lot of their friends have come to support them.” Susan Callan-Harris, a physical therapist with a display demonstrating good posture, said, “This year it was way better. People have been much more willing to come up and talk to the staffers.”Previous Fairs were much less popular. Most students representing activist groups couldn’t even say if their group had taken part in the last one. “Maybe we were,” Trulie Ankerburg-Nobis said, who was one of several representatives of URVeg at the Fair. “I’m not sure.”The Project for Promotion of University of Rochester People Opting for Safer Experiences, or PURPOSE for short, is a student group which works closely with HPO and did a lot of the work of organizing the Pleasure Party. Lindsay Lefenfeld, a leader of Project PURPOSE and a senior, said the turnout and popularity were due to greater cooperation between the Wellness Fair and the Pleasure Party. “Instead of competing with each other on different dates, we decided to work together, so today they’re sending students to us and vice versa,” she explained.”This is the second year of Project PURPOSE,” Lefenfeld said. “Each year we get a little bigger.” At the Wellness Fair, student volunteers and UHS employees gave posture tests, carbon monoxide tests, vision tests, blood pressure tests, free massages, fresh fruit and samples of health food. At the Pleasure Party upstairs, candy, pamphlets discussing STDs, free condoms and lube, both regular and flavored, were all available. Senior Jenny Richter agreed that this year’s Pleasure Party was a success. “There was a lot of really good resources there and a lot of interesting people,” she said. “We had a lot of interest, and a lot of people kept coming up and getting pamphlets or just asking us questions,” she added, referring to the Women’s Caucus table. Senior and SA President Chris Calo found the day’s events useful. “I actually just came here to get some nutritional information,” he said. “I was looking for more academic research here. I had looked online, but I could only find stuff like ‘do this, don’t do that.’ Here, they were able to point me in the right direction.”In addition to the educational and entertaining displays, many were more serious. At the Pleasure Party, a table run by the Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit at the URMC was asking for subjects for a herpes vaccine trial. Genital herpes affects roughly one in four or five sexually active college-age people. One woman curious about the study asked why they were offering so much money if it was safe to participate in the study. Carol Nolan, a nurse working in the study, said, “We’re not giving you a lot of money because it’s anything dangerous.” She explained, “I think it’s a reasonable amount for people to talk to us over and over again [for two years]. This requires some commitment – it’s an important thing.”For more information about the genital herpes vaccine trial, please call the Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit at 273-3990 or visit their Web site at http://www.herpesvaccine.nih.gov. Levesque can be reached at clevesque@campustimes.org.