MSM urgently need access to vaccines and public-health information to keep themselves safe. The most important time to be pointing out disparities is when the relevant population is both unaware of them and can take personal action to prevent harm. Public officials seem to have the logic exactly backwards. Might not Black Americans be stigmatized for being disproportionately impacted by these illnesses? Similarly, might not transgender youth be stigmatized for being disproportionately likely to end up homeless? Why is it that, at a time when governmental institutions are more willing than ever before to recognize and call out these disparate impacts, officials are so wary of calling out the disparate impact of monkeypox? Government officials often talk about the disparate impacts of illnesses such as diabetes, sickle-cell disease, and COVID-19 on Black Americans. Officials are wary of reinforcing stigmas. Though hurricanes and infectious diseases are both acts of nature, Floridians are not stigmatized for their vulnerability to hurricanes in the way that gay men might be for their current vulnerability to monkeypox. But what about this hurricane, right now? Who is it most likely to strike? You’d probably be left feeling frustrated, confused, and underprepared. You turn on your TV and see the head of FEMA talking about how anyone could be struck by a hurricane-and stressing that hurricanes are not Floridians’ fault. But imagine for a moment that a hurricane is making landfall on your state. On its face, the “anyone can get monkeypox” messaging is true. Weiss said - was to make people overly concerned about casual physical contact and not sufficiently aware that most monkeypox infections in New York appeared to be transmitted through sex. While those are certainly possible routes of transmission, the result - Dr. The Health Department’s guidance to the public has often highlighted nonsexual routes of potential transmission, such as hugging or contact with bedding. The story revealed a widespread discomfort within the agency with acknowledging and highlighting the primary route of monkeypox transmission: sex between men. Yesterday, The New York Times reported on a battle within New York City’s health department. ![]() These organizations “saw the campaign as diverting money and attention away from the communities that needed it the most” and instead focusing resources on much lower-risk populations. Smithsonian magazine has documented how some AIDS organizations criticized the federal government for its “everyone is at risk” message in the late 1980s and early ’90s. This is not the first time American public-health officials have pushed a confusing communications strategy about the transmissibility of a dangerous virus. ![]() And yet, many public-health officials-and some media outlets-have scrambled to combat the idea that monkeypox is a “gay disease.” (Both the CDC and WHO websites bury mentions of MSM risk.) These authorities, Ryan has argued, have spread a message “so egregiously misleading it amounts to misinformation.” officials are taking action to specifically protect men who have sex with other men (MSM) from monkeypox-importantly, supplies of the vaccine have largely been reserved for that community. is, frustratingly, not collecting demographic details on monkeypox patients, Britain is, and the numbers there are clear: “Half of men screened for monkeypox tested positive women, by contrast, tested positive only 0.6 percent of the time.”Īnd yet, despite this barrage of data, an American following the public-health messaging on monkeypox might come away with the idea that all populations are similarly at risk of contracting the disease. outbreak-New York City-show that “the number of monkeypox cases has nearly tripled in the last week, nearly all of them among men who have sex with men.” The infectious-disease and LGBTQ-health journalist Benjamin Ryan notes that though the U.S. A recent update from the World Health Organization noted that cases in newly afflicted countries have mainly been among “men who have had recent sexual contact with a new or multiple male partners.” In Europe, just 0.2 percent of the men who have gotten the disease identify as heterosexual. In the parts of the world where monkeypox is newly spreading, like the United States and Europe, the people currently most at risk of getting the disease are gay and bisexual men.
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