Imagine your child calling up a hotline to find out information on HIV and AIDS - instead he gets a hardcore sex hotline. This happened when one kid, Lori Felzien's son, dialed the number that happened to be printed on a bookmark issued during a health lesson at his elementary school. He handed the phone over to his mother, so she could hear.
Needless to say, Felzein's reaction was "we've got to get these cards out of these kids' hands."
How did it happen? The toll free number once belonged to Teens Teaching AIDS prevention, part of the Kansas City-based Nonprofit Good Samaritan Project. (Stress on the words "once belonged"). This AIDS hotline went out of service about a year ago. Since then, a sex hotline took over the number.
A spokeswoman for the Missouri Health Department, Nanci Gonder, reported that her office is trying to contact HIV and AIDS prevention groups around the state about this mix up. She also stated that the health department was unaware the the hotline no longer existed, and that it will review all distributed phone numbers in the future.
This makes me wonder about other things that might have been distributed long ago, about various innocent subjects. Are the numbers still good? If they aren't the same numbers, what company replaces them? Talk about a completely different group taking over that number! I guess we should be aware of old bookmarks, magnets, etc that have numbers on them as well. Who's to say that those numbers still connect to innocent phone lines? We should check them out once in a while and, if they're no longer numbers to what they're supposed to be to, we should get rid of them.