[3] In 1961, Robins's Bowl of Hygeia Award program expanded to Canada, and by 1967 it was being given by the pharmacists' associations in all 50 U.S. states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and all 10 Canadian provinces.
[1] State, provincial, and national pharmacists' associations now each select and sponsor their annual Bowl of Hygeia winners.
[5] The student is selected by his or her classmates along with the faculty members and is selected based on which individual most exemplifies the desirable qualities of a pharmacist[6] In September 2015, a controversy erupted when an APhA Foundation-sponsored "Bowl of Hygeia" award was given to Louisiana pharmacist Lloyd Duplantis, who not only was a prominent figure in a movement of pharmacists who refused to dispense the birth control pill,[7] but had self-published a book[8] considered full of pseudo-scientific theories, the most notorious being a contention that high-dose estrogen birth control pills lead to an increase in "effeminate men" and homosexuality.
The book also theorized that since these type of pills were tested in Haiti during the 1950s, by the 1970s a higher percentage of the population would be homosexual, and that a "unique population transfer" occurred during that time between Haiti and Zaire, where the AIDS virus had been created as a result of "errant vaccine experiments", so that the Haitians then contracted the virus and brought it to the Western Hemisphere.
[citation needed] The Pharmaceutical Society of Australia also presents a Bowl of Hygeia Award (note the slightly different spelling).