IF YOU’RE PLANNING ON GOING TO CARNAVAL in Brazil, there’s a good chance you’re going to be hooking up. That’s cool, no one’s judging: if we were going, we’d be doing it too. But, even in a regular year, we’d probably give you an obligatory piece of advice: Practice safe sex.
It’s not exactly hard to do: when I was in Salvador, Brazil for Carnaval about 9 years back, random people walked through the streets handing out condoms. They were free, and they were everywhere. But there are still people who insist on not using condoms when they have sex, and this, at the best of times, is dangerous. And this is not the best of times: in Brazil right now, there’s a pandemic of the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne illness that is usually not life-threatening but has been linked to birth defects in unborn babies.
