Blame and shame are harming our response to monkeypox
BMJ 2022; 378 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o2134 (Published 01 September 2022) Cite this as: BMJ 2022;378:o2134
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Dear Editor,
Naming and Shaming really will not serve any purpose.
That way affected people will hide the problem and expose many more people to risk of infection.
As it is, a dog was infected by humans it stayed with.
Thus Human to Human, Animal to Human and Human to Animal Pathways of transmission are possible.
Everyone, people, scientists, Governments, social and charitable institutions, all should focus on various ways of prevention including and besides vaccination and treatment.
More importantly, one has to realise that many new infections and many new presentations of old infections are surfacing. Everyone should be prepared for this situation.
Dr Arvind Joshi,
MBBS MD FCGP FAMS FICP.
Competing interests: No competing interests
A terrible sense of 'deja vu'- monkeypox and HIV
Dear Editor
Forty years ago, young gay men were crowding into clinics across San Francisco and New York with strange skin lesions, due to Kaposi's Sarcoma - an ailment usually linked to the old.
Thus did HIV begin.
No one then knew how big the HIV pandemic would be.
Now, we have unprecedented rashes and abscesses in gay men once more.
Monkeypox, endemic in Africa, has found a new way to spread in countries such as Spain - through sex, through 'skin-to-skin contact rather than [the] respiratory route' (1).
I bet monkeypox is being underestimated, just as Covid was, and just as HIV was, initially.
The potential monkeypox vaccine isn't being rolled out fast enough.
Soho's 'gay scene', in not so swinging London, is today starting to shudder, just as it did back in the 1980s, because of HIV.
STD clinics in the capital are being disrupted by monkeypox as much as by Covid.
Randy Shilts, in his 'And the Band Played on', provides a warning we're stupidly refusing to heed: with plague, if you don't act fast, you're going to lose.
References:
(1) Sexual behaviours and clinical course of human monkeypox in Spain. Dimie Ogima. Lancet. pgs. 636-637. Vol. 400. Aug 27, 2022.
(2) And the Band Played On. Randy Shilts. Viking. 1987.
Competing interests: No competing interests