KEY WEST -- At Headlines Hair & Nails beauty salon in Key West, clients can get a cut, color and complimentary condoms. At Stock Island Fades & Spa barbershop, guys stop in for a trim and can also go home with free Trojans.

The condoms are kept in boxes that say: “We play safe in the Keys.”

“We push people to take the condoms because we care about people here,” said Stock Island Fades & Spa owner Eric Castellanos, who also hands out information about the county’s free HIV testing.

The condoms are courtesy of the Monroe County Health Department, which receives them from the state health department’s Division of Disease Control. Last year, about 15.2 million condoms of all varieties were distributed throughout Florida. In Miami-Dade County, the health department distributed 2.25 million condoms last year. In Broward, the number was 1.8 million.

In the Keys, with a population of only 78,000, nearly 500,000 were given out at 130 locations from Key Largo to Key West. The goal is to prevent the further spread of HIV/AIDS in the island chain, where nearly 900 people are now living with some form of the disease and another 600 have died from it, said Cyna Wright, the HIV/AIDS program coordinator for the county health department.

Of those nearly 900 people living with HIV/AIDS, about 20 percent don’t know they are infected with the virus, which attacks and weakens the body’s immune system by destroying white blood cells that fight infections.

Monroe County also has the state’s second-highest percentage of men over 12 who are infected —about 1 in 60. “That’s scary,” Wright said. Only Miami-Dade County’s percentage is higher, 1 in 56.

“I’d like to get it to zero new cases,” Wright said. “This is a disease that is completely preventable. It’s all about behavior.”

Helping to hammer home the practice-safe-sex message in the Keys are longtime county health department HIV prevention educators Peggy Ward-Grant and Clayton Lopez, who is nicknamed “Condom Man.”

“I guess I am the Condom Lady,” said Ward-Grant, who gives out goodie bags with condoms after administering free HIV tests. “If people run out, I tell them to come back to see me and I’ll have another goodie bag waiting for them.”

Ward-Grant once came to work in a dress made out of condoms. The special attire was for National Condom Day, which coincides with Valentine’s Day, Tuesday this year.

National Condom Day was created in 1978 by David Mayer, then a student at UC Berkeley. His goal was to get his sexually active classmates to stop risking their health by not protecting themselves against diseases.

A few years later, condom sales skyrocketed with the rise of the AIDS/HIV crisis, which began as a disease that usually came with a death sentence.

That once loud-and-clear message is not so loud and clear these days.

That’s the case even in the high risk communities for HIV/AIDS, which includes gay men and African-Americans. Complacency about using condoms has set in due to the advancement of HIV/AIDS treatments that prolong life, said Lopez, who also a Key West city commissioner.

Public health educators say it’s necessary to continuously promote condom use, just as well-known brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola continuously hawk their products.