My two weeks of monkeypox hell
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> I had sex with several guys over the weekend. Then a week later, on 1 July, I started feeling very fatigued. I had a high fever with chills and muscle aches, and my lymph nodes were so swollen they were protruding two inches out of my throat.
The connection between the Pride event and the spread of monkeypox seems like something that public health officials may want to consider. Entire industries were shut down for extended periods of time in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID. There's ample precedent now.
The author blames the state of public health in NYC, but the simplest way to avoid such suffering in the gay male community is to discourage promiscuity.
You don't have to be gay to get the disease either, that's an unhelpful framing of the issue - we don't need to revisit the attitudes to homosexuals from over 30 years ago, and we don't need to defend systems that are barely working and deliver minimal support to people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/nyregion/nyc-monkeypox-he...
The spread of monkeypox has ignited a debate within the New York City Health Department over whether the agency should encourage gay men to reduce their number of sexual partners during this summer’s outbreak.
Inside the department, officials are battling over public messaging as the number of monkeypox cases has nearly tripled in the last week, nearly all of them among men who have sex with men. A few epidemiologists say the city should be encouraging gay men to temporarily change their sexual behavior while the disease spreads, while other officials argue that approach would stigmatize gay men and would backfire.
The internal divisions peaked when the health department issued an advisory last week suggesting that having sex while infected with monkeypox could be made safer if people avoided kissing and covered their sores. Several officials at the agency were outraged, saying the agency was giving misleading and even dangerous health advice, according to several epidemiologists within the department and a review of internal emails.
The advice on safer sex was not medically sound, said Dr. Don Weiss, the director of surveillance for the department’s Bureau of Communicable Disease, in an interview. He believes the department should advise those at risk of monkeypox to temporarily reduce their number of partners, saying, “We’re not telling people what they have to do to be safe.”
His concerns are shared by some of his colleagues, emails and interviews show, indicating growing frustration and pessimism within the ranks of the health department as the window for controlling New York City’s monkeypox epidemic — the largest such outbreak in the United States — quickly closes.
Monkeypox has been spreading globally since early May. In New York City, where nearly all monkeypox patients are gay or bisexual men, there were 618 documented cases of monkeypox in the city as of Monday, though Dr. Weiss said that the true number of infections was far higher, because testing has been limited. The strategy favored by Dr. Weiss, who has long played a frontline role in the department’s response to disease outbreaks, has received little traction within the department.
In fact, the agency in a statement Monday argued against such an approach. “For decades, the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community has had their sex lives dissected, prescribed, and proscribed in myriad ways, mostly by heterosexual and cis people,” the statement said.