7 ms·

This article seems to want to paint the government as at fault for the spread of the disease. Then this line appears further down: "In San Francisco, B, a 43-y

This article seems to want to paint the government as at fault for the spread of the disease. Then this line appears further down: "In San Francisco, B, a 43-year-old medical writer who asked that his name be withheld for privacy reasons, found himself shivering uncontrollably with a high fever on June 14, eight days after he had multiple sexual encounters at a bathhouse in Chicago" At this point in time Monkey Pox is a known disease and the fact that it is highly transmissible via male on male sex is a known transmission vector. If people insist on engaging in high risk sex with multiple partners while a communicable disease is running rampant, at what point does it become their responsibility? HIV is still a thing too and people continue to engage in this high risk behavior. I see no reason why if people just eased up on the high risk sex with multiple partners for a couple of months that this disease would not return to dormancy. Virtually all reported cases have been traced to this transmission vector. There is only so much government money and resources to fight diseases, this one seems like low hanging fruit that the affected community could solve with some leadership, personal responsibility and group effort.

ejb999 4y ago
not to mention not a single death in the USA (at least yet) - I really don't want the government over reacting every time a virus pops up; there is value in waiting to see how things play out first. Seems like the media is trying really hard to hype this one now that Covid story is getting stale.
- christkv 4y ago
  You are going to love the just breaking news about another possible Marburg (Ebola cousin) outbreak in Ghana.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >there is value in waiting to see how things play out first No, when it comes to managing diseases the value is in acting before things have gone bad. It completely blows my mind how after a million covid deaths in the US alone, and the pandemic not even being over, people repeat the same kind of arguments again. or HIV for that matter if you want to draw a comparison to another sexually transmittable disease that was not taken seriously either.
  - thisiscorrect 4y ago
    The comparison to HIV is apt. At its peak, in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone was taught to dread this disease. Officials acted as though everyone was equally at risk of contracting it. That was incorrect, and pretending otherwise helped noone.
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      >At its peak, in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone was taught to dread this disease And have you considered that is precisely why it peaked? HIV has killed 50 million people worldwide. 35 million of them in Africa. It still kills almost a million people a year. In countries without appropriate response, it has infected large segments of the population, and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously?
      - thisiscorrect 4y ago
        > and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously? I'm out here unironically showing you data on the CDC's website: https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html. Anal intercourse is far likelier (18x the risk from vaginal interourse per encounter) to result in HIV transmission from an infected partner. Internal tearing is likelier and hence contact of other fluids with one's blood stream. In Africa, HIV is especially prevalent in South Africa, which happens to have a practice called "dry sex" [1] which also leads to similar internal tearing for the receptive partner. Behavior that involves having these sorts of risky sexual encounters with multiple partners only compounds the likelihood that one will contract HIV. Not all groups engage in these behaviors with equal likelihood. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex
        wonderwonder 4y ago
        Adding to this over 40% of South African women are raped over the course of their lives. This also results in tearing.
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  At the moment the virus is confined to that part of the gay population that attends wild orgies - healthy young men. Mortality for that segment of the population is low, although by all accounts monkeypox is still exquisitely painful. Once it gets to pregnant women we will see miscarriages in 4 out of 5 cases. Things will improve then, but not before.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    It's not confined to just the gay population. The UK has a child in the ICU over it for example: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1614153/monkeypox-British-child-in-intensive-care-latest https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1614153/monkeypox-British-... Many states in the US are confirming there is community spread happening, i.e. it's not restricted to a subset of the gay or hetero community. Here's Seattle for example confirming there are cases with no known sexual encounter or link: https://publichealthinsider.com/2022/07/06/monkeypox-update-local-transmission-of-the-virus-in-king-county-likely/ https://publichealthinsider.com/2022/07/06/monkeypox-update-...
    - scarmig 4y ago
      As an LGBT guy: Yes, there are non-gay people who get it. But gay men, and particularly people who have sex with a dozen different partners in a week (not many straight men in that particular group), are much more likely to contract it. Efforts to limit the spread of monkeypox should be targeted at the demographics most likely to contract it, as you get much more bang-for-buck that way.
      - qbasic_forever 4y ago
        The cat's out of the bag when community spread is confirmed like we see now. The time to take targeted measures for a community getting hit hard by it was a month ago when it was the dozens and low hundreds of cases. Now we're seeing 2k+ cases worldwide a day, and that's with very low testing. We need to shift into proper pandemic response mode--TETRIS, test-trace-isolate. There is nothing inherent about the DNA of this virus that makes it target men, gay men, or men who have sex with men. It will infect any human in the wrong place at the wrong time, period.
nostromo 4y ago
On the one hand, I agree with you. People should be more responsible. But if your strategy is "people should have less sex for a while" then your strategy will fail -- just as our "everyone stay home for two weeks" didn't work for Covid. Even if most people will follow the guidelines, enough people won't and your strategy will fail. So, yes, it is a government failure that we didn't have vaccines on hand for virus we stopped vaccinating for a long time ago. These are things we can control. We give the CDC a lot of money to help prevent these things. By the way -- you can't get a test if you're not a man that has sex with men -- and that's very likely skewing the results. On Twitter many straight people report having blisters and symptoms but are denied tests because they don't fit the profile.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  Very bizarre to me the way that avoiding covid was moralized and yet the same public health professionals seem more than a little skittish to do so around this. Particularly when the behavior is easier to avoid than breathing the same air as other people. I'd also like to add that having group sex in public places is not the only way to have sex. Your comment seems to conflate this with all sexual activity.
  - corrral 4y ago
    Yeah... I was mostly in favor of Covid restrictions but it's bizarre to say that "no doing [huge list of normal things everyone does]" is fine and if you don't play along you're a plague rat, but balk at "maybe avoid having tons of anonymous sex with strangers for a little while" because that's just unreasonable.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Reasonable or not, resistance to that suggestion is a reality. We have to play the hand we're dealt.
  - suscialmadia 4y ago
    There is a long and dark history to moralizing and even legislating how and when consenting adults can have sex with each other. So maybe it's a bit like discussing eugenics. It wasn't a particularly difficult topic when people like Plato were abstractly philosophizing about ideal societies, but it is a charged topic today because we have seen where that road leads in practice. It's also easier to ask people to make shared sacrifices which everybody should bear equally.
krona 4y ago
> HIV is still a thing too and people continue to engage in this high risk behavior. UK technical briefing (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/monkeypox-outbreak-technical-briefings/investigation-into-monkeypox-outbreak-in-england-technical-briefing-3 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/monkeypox-outbrea...): > Where known, more than half had history of STI in the last year (54%, 233 out of 445); 30% (123) were living with HIV; 16% (67 out of 445) had one or no sexual partners, and 31% (134) had 10 or more sexual partners in the last 3 months. Similar stats in Europe - 40% HIV positive where known. (https://monkeypoxreport.ecdc.europa.eu/ https://monkeypoxreport.ecdc.europa.eu/)
im3w1l 4y ago
Relying on altruism is clearly not working. So we have to consider how to properly incentivize responsible behavior.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
perardi 4y ago
“There is only so much government money and resources to fight diseases, this one seems like low hanging fruit that the affected community could solve with some leadership, personal responsibility and group effort.” Listen, as a gay man, I’m just going to go ahead and say we are not the greatest at self-control sometimes. But, living in Chicago? The minute they made the vaccine available for monkeypox, there were lines out the door. Through the roof demand. (Through the roof of Steamworks, because in a move that makes total sense but is also totally hilarious, the first pop-up event was at a bathhouse.) We will get this vaccine in a heartbeat. But we can’t. Because, in part…the FDA slow walked the inspection of the single plant that produces this vaccine. So it won’t be at full capacity for quite a while. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/07/monkeypox-vaccine-delayed-after-fda-waited-to-inspect-plant.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/07/monkeypox-vaccine-de...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nostromo 4y ago
  > Listen, as a gay man, I’m just going to go ahead and say we are not the greatest at self-control sometimes. As compared to whom? All those straight men and their renowned self-control?
  - n8cpdx 4y ago
    It’s pretty well documented that straight men have a harder time finding partners for anonymous/casual sex than gay men do. It’s like a whole complex for people, almost to the level of being a meme. https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Tinder-work-for-average-guys-like-myself https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Tinder-work-for-average-guy... As a gay man, I could absolutely be getting a blowjob in the next ~2 hours (conservatively) if I dropped my standards enough - almost anywhere. I don’t think that’s true for straight men; self control isn’t the limiting factor.
    - nostromo 4y ago
      So say that then. Saying gay men lack self control is a different claim entirely, not to mention offensive.
TMWNN 4y ago
>At this point in time Monkey Pox is a known disease and the fact that it is highly transmissible via male on male sex is a known transmission vector. If people insist on engaging in high risk sex with multiple partners while a communicable disease is running rampant, at what point does it become their responsibility? HIV is still a thing too and people continue to engage in this high risk behavior. Some numbers on said high-risk behavior: Gay men on average have six times the number of lifetime sexual partners as straight men or women (<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3334840/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3334840/>), and Psychology Today says 50% of gay men in San Francisco have more than 500 partners (<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201703/it-s-the-mode-men-have-more-sex-partners https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-imprinted-brain/...>).

ejb999 4y ago

not to mention not a single death in the USA (at least yet) - I really don't want the government over reacting every time a virus pops up; there is value in waiting to see how things play out first. Seems like the media is trying really hard to hype this one now that Covid story is getting stale.

christkv 4y ago
You are going to love the just breaking news about another possible Marburg (Ebola cousin) outbreak in Ghana.
Barrin92 4y ago
>there is value in waiting to see how things play out first No, when it comes to managing diseases the value is in acting before things have gone bad. It completely blows my mind how after a million covid deaths in the US alone, and the pandemic not even being over, people repeat the same kind of arguments again. or HIV for that matter if you want to draw a comparison to another sexually transmittable disease that was not taken seriously either.
- thisiscorrect 4y ago
  The comparison to HIV is apt. At its peak, in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone was taught to dread this disease. Officials acted as though everyone was equally at risk of contracting it. That was incorrect, and pretending otherwise helped noone.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    >At its peak, in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone was taught to dread this disease And have you considered that is precisely why it peaked? HIV has killed 50 million people worldwide. 35 million of them in Africa. It still kills almost a million people a year. In countries without appropriate response, it has infected large segments of the population, and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously?
    - thisiscorrect 4y ago
      > and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously? I'm out here unironically showing you data on the CDC's website: https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html. Anal intercourse is far likelier (18x the risk from vaginal interourse per encounter) to result in HIV transmission from an infected partner. Internal tearing is likelier and hence contact of other fluids with one's blood stream. In Africa, HIV is especially prevalent in South Africa, which happens to have a practice called "dry sex" [1] which also leads to similar internal tearing for the receptive partner. Behavior that involves having these sorts of risky sexual encounters with multiple partners only compounds the likelihood that one will contract HIV. Not all groups engage in these behaviors with equal likelihood. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex
      - wonderwonder 4y ago
        Adding to this over 40% of South African women are raped over the course of their lives. This also results in tearing.
HarryHirsch 4y ago
At the moment the virus is confined to that part of the gay population that attends wild orgies - healthy young men. Mortality for that segment of the population is low, although by all accounts monkeypox is still exquisitely painful. Once it gets to pregnant women we will see miscarriages in 4 out of 5 cases. Things will improve then, but not before.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  It's not confined to just the gay population. The UK has a child in the ICU over it for example: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1614153/monkeypox-British-child-in-intensive-care-latest https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1614153/monkeypox-British-... Many states in the US are confirming there is community spread happening, i.e. it's not restricted to a subset of the gay or hetero community. Here's Seattle for example confirming there are cases with no known sexual encounter or link: https://publichealthinsider.com/2022/07/06/monkeypox-update-local-transmission-of-the-virus-in-king-county-likely/ https://publichealthinsider.com/2022/07/06/monkeypox-update-...
  - scarmig 4y ago
    As an LGBT guy: Yes, there are non-gay people who get it. But gay men, and particularly people who have sex with a dozen different partners in a week (not many straight men in that particular group), are much more likely to contract it. Efforts to limit the spread of monkeypox should be targeted at the demographics most likely to contract it, as you get much more bang-for-buck that way.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      The cat's out of the bag when community spread is confirmed like we see now. The time to take targeted measures for a community getting hit hard by it was a month ago when it was the dozens and low hundreds of cases. Now we're seeing 2k+ cases worldwide a day, and that's with very low testing. We need to shift into proper pandemic response mode--TETRIS, test-trace-isolate. There is nothing inherent about the DNA of this virus that makes it target men, gay men, or men who have sex with men. It will infect any human in the wrong place at the wrong time, period.

nostromo 4y ago

On the one hand, I agree with you. People should be more responsible. But if your strategy is "people should have less sex for a while" then your strategy will fail -- just as our "everyone stay home for two weeks" didn't work for Covid. Even if most people will follow the guidelines, enough people won't and your strategy will fail. So, yes, it is a government failure that we didn't have vaccines on hand for virus we stopped vaccinating for a long time ago. These are things we can control. We give the CDC a lot of money to help prevent these things. By the way -- you can't get a test if you're not a man that has sex with men -- and that's very likely skewing the results. On Twitter many straight people report having blisters and symptoms but are denied tests because they don't fit the profile.

chitowneats 4y ago
Very bizarre to me the way that avoiding covid was moralized and yet the same public health professionals seem more than a little skittish to do so around this. Particularly when the behavior is easier to avoid than breathing the same air as other people. I'd also like to add that having group sex in public places is not the only way to have sex. Your comment seems to conflate this with all sexual activity.
- corrral 4y ago
  Yeah... I was mostly in favor of Covid restrictions but it's bizarre to say that "no doing [huge list of normal things everyone does]" is fine and if you don't play along you're a plague rat, but balk at "maybe avoid having tons of anonymous sex with strangers for a little while" because that's just unreasonable.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Reasonable or not, resistance to that suggestion is a reality. We have to play the hand we're dealt.
- suscialmadia 4y ago
  There is a long and dark history to moralizing and even legislating how and when consenting adults can have sex with each other. So maybe it's a bit like discussing eugenics. It wasn't a particularly difficult topic when people like Plato were abstractly philosophizing about ideal societies, but it is a charged topic today because we have seen where that road leads in practice. It's also easier to ask people to make shared sacrifices which everybody should bear equally.

krona 4y ago

> HIV is still a thing too and people continue to engage in this high risk behavior. UK technical briefing (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/monkeypox-outbreak-technical-briefings/investigation-into-monkeypox-outbreak-in-england-technical-briefing-3 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/monkeypox-outbrea...): > Where known, more than half had history of STI in the last year (54%, 233 out of 445); 30% (123) were living with HIV; 16% (67 out of 445) had one or no sexual partners, and 31% (134) had 10 or more sexual partners in the last 3 months. Similar stats in Europe - 40% HIV positive where known. (https://monkeypoxreport.ecdc.europa.eu/ https://monkeypoxreport.ecdc.europa.eu/)

im3w1l 4y ago

Relying on altruism is clearly not working. So we have to consider how to properly incentivize responsible behavior.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

perardi 4y ago

“There is only so much government money and resources to fight diseases, this one seems like low hanging fruit that the affected community could solve with some leadership, personal responsibility and group effort.” Listen, as a gay man, I’m just going to go ahead and say we are not the greatest at self-control sometimes. But, living in Chicago? The minute they made the vaccine available for monkeypox, there were lines out the door. Through the roof demand. (Through the roof of Steamworks, because in a move that makes total sense but is also totally hilarious, the first pop-up event was at a bathhouse.) We will get this vaccine in a heartbeat. But we can’t. Because, in part…the FDA slow walked the inspection of the single plant that produces this vaccine. So it won’t be at full capacity for quite a while. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/07/monkeypox-vaccine-delayed-after-fda-waited-to-inspect-plant.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/07/monkeypox-vaccine-de...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nostromo 4y ago
> Listen, as a gay man, I’m just going to go ahead and say we are not the greatest at self-control sometimes. As compared to whom? All those straight men and their renowned self-control?
- n8cpdx 4y ago
  It’s pretty well documented that straight men have a harder time finding partners for anonymous/casual sex than gay men do. It’s like a whole complex for people, almost to the level of being a meme. https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Tinder-work-for-average-guys-like-myself https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Tinder-work-for-average-guy... As a gay man, I could absolutely be getting a blowjob in the next ~2 hours (conservatively) if I dropped my standards enough - almost anywhere. I don’t think that’s true for straight men; self control isn’t the limiting factor.
  - nostromo 4y ago
    So say that then. Saying gay men lack self control is a different claim entirely, not to mention offensive.

TMWNN 4y ago

>At this point in time Monkey Pox is a known disease and the fact that it is highly transmissible via male on male sex is a known transmission vector. If people insist on engaging in high risk sex with multiple partners while a communicable disease is running rampant, at what point does it become their responsibility? HIV is still a thing too and people continue to engage in this high risk behavior. Some numbers on said high-risk behavior: Gay men on average have six times the number of lifetime sexual partners as straight men or women (<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3334840/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3334840/>), and Psychology Today says 50% of gay men in San Francisco have more than 500 partners (<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201703/it-s-the-mode-men-have-more-sex-partners https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-imprinted-brain/...>).