HIV is a relatively inefficient retrovirus which affects the immune system.
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How do you stop transmission of a casually transmitted virus moving among despised populations (who live in what I call in my forthcoming book a viral underclass) without creating stigma and harming public health? To unpack this paradox and understand how to best address stigma and viral transmission right now, it might be helpful to look at the particularities of HIV/AIDS, SARS-CoV-2/COVID and MPX-for understanding what’s already been learned about each of them that might help us better understand how to address any of them. Governments and businesses around the world only nominally cared about COVID because they thought it might affect the health and wealth-building capability of the ruling class they may be as unlikely to care about MPX as they have been about HIV. That the populations most likely to be affected by MPX have long been people in Africa, and now include men who have sex with men in Europe and North America, makes it track along dangerous lines of stimga similar to HIV/AIDS, a relatively inefficient virus at the same time, MPX is a much more transmissible than HIV (though less efficient than SARS-CoV-2). But MPX is not a “gay disease.” Indeed, as Bloomberg News reported, though MPX can (and currently is) moving through sexual contact, it it not a sexually transmitted infection according to the World Health Organization, it is “transmitted from one person to another by close contact with lesions, body fluids, respiratory droplets and contaminated materials such as bedding.”īut MPX is moving through networks of men who have sex with other men, in the midst of the two-year-plus COVID pandemic and the 42-year-plus AIDS pandemic. As public health expert Gregg Gonsalves wrote in the Nation, there are 550 cases and counting. The largest outbreaks have been traced to gay saunas and raves in Europe, as well as to a gay sauna in Montreal. alone, suggesting undetected global spread has been occurring for some time. But, as Science reported, countries like Nigeria use the kinds of effective nonpharmaceutical interventions with MPX that the United States and Europe have largely eschewed with the novel coronavirus: putting the effort in to perform surveillance, helping affected people isolate, sequencing viruses to track spread and sharing their findings with others.īut MPX has been popping up all over the world the last couple of months, with at least two strains in the U.S. African countries do not have an ample supply of stockpiled pharmaceutical vaccines and antiretrovirals. And while it is endemic there in rodents, several African countries have developed excellent public health practices to minimize outbreaks among humans, which Europeans and North Americans have largely neglected.
Monkeypox has largely been found in Western and Central Africa in the last few decades. Graduations, weddings, concerts and banquets are churning on indoors, as if 10,000 people a month aren’t still dying of COVID.īut more specifically, I was worried about monkeypox (MPX) making an appearance at IML, as I am concerned about it making its way through LGBTQ Pride events and circuit parties this month. Enragingly, the Society for Epidemiologic Research is also meeting in Chicago soon, despite the latest coronavirus surge. Of course, gay men coming and going from around the world for a conference isn’t any more or less worrisome than any large group gathering indoors. I found myself very concerned about the event in part because, even by the low standards of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, community spread of SARS-CoV-2 was “ high” in Chicago, causing uncontrollable community spread of that virus. (This year, the honor went to Gael Leung Chong Wo of Belgium.) IML is like the Miss America pageant, except those working the runway are clad in harnesses. Leather conference, a four-day-long affair where men from all over the world gathered to strut their stuff in leather gear, have lots of sex, and compete to be named International Mr. In Chicago last month, thousands of gay men gathered for the first time in three years for the annual International Mr.