Advertising, health promotion, and lots of latex
The biennial Olympic condom story is out. The Rio Olympics are planning to give away 450,000 condoms in the Olympic Village, compared to a mere 150,000 in London, and 90,000 in Sydney (initially 70,000, but they ran out).
This graph shows (with black dots) the publicised numbers for the past Olympics that I could find easily (Torino seems to be keeping quiet, for some reason)
So, why so many? Condoms are cheap to produce and hard to advertise. Even buying retail from Amazon you can get 1000 for less than US$150, so 450,000 would cost about US$65k. In a setting like this, I’m sure the health promotion folks are paying a lot less than that, and the international news coverage implying that Olympic athletes have safe sex is worth far more than the cost of materials.
The red dot? Oh yes. That’s the number handed out by the Health Ministry campaigners at street parties for Carnival this year in Brazil.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »