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It wasn’t easy for Health Canada’s top managers to turn a much-loved nursery rhyme into a story of incest and sexually-transmitted infection, bringing down the wrath of Twitter readers and even the Privy Council Office.

But they managed it just the same.

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The department was trying to inject a little fun into its Twitter feed in the early fall. It decided to write short poems with public health information, labeled “random acts of poetry.”

Planned, scheduled, edited and rewritten by a small army, the poems were about as random and spontaneous as a mission to Mars.

And on Oct. 2 this poem appeared on Health Canada’s Twitter account, @GovCanHealth:

“Jack and Jill did the deed,

But they forgot something they need,

Should have wrapped it up — oh my!

Now both have an STI.”

There was a link to information on condoms.

The tweet disappeared within an hour, though screenshot versions are still floating around.