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It’s really not all that easy to catch.

Which is why it has so far been mostly limited to homosexual men.

There is a large population of homosexual men in this country that, by their own estimates, sodomize or are sodomized by literally hundreds of different strangers per year. If you introduce any communicable disease to this group it will quickly and inevitably spread to thousands of homosexual men throughout the country.

If it is an easily communicable disease like COVID, then they will just accelerate the spread to the entire population. If it is a difficult to catch disease like AIDS or other venereal diseases, then the spread will be mostly limited to homosexual men.

Apparently, Monkeypox is somewhere in between. It is not a strictly venereal disease and can be spread without sexual contact, but it is not airborne and requires some physical contact.

Yes, you are right. True, it’s not airborne, and it’s not anywhere close to being as easy to catch as Covid (which is), but not as hard to catch as HIV/AIDS. For example, you can get it from handling the soiled bedding or laundry of an infected person with weeping pustules if you have a tiny skin break on your hand or you rub your eye soon afterward. Or if an infected person coughs or sneezes close to your face, especially if that person has pustules inside his mouth or throat.

In Africa, it was only seen in small children after smallpox vaccination ceased. As the population of unvaccinated people aged up, the ages of those who caught it went up. Still, it remained fairly rare, usually caught by people handling the carcasses of infected animals while preparing “bush meat” and sometimes spreading it to household members.

Then it was caught by a guy who went to that huge Pride rave on Gran Canaria which turned out to be a “super spreader” event, and some who caught it there next travelled to the big Fetish Festival in Antwerp or the big orgy at the gay sauna in Madrid, spreading it further. And so on it went. Which is why Pride Month became Monkeypox Month.

There have been other outbreaks outside Africa in the past decade or so, usually someone returning to the UK from Nigeria. These were all easily contained, and did not spread beyond Patient 0, other than occasional household members, and in one case, a healthcare worker with insufficient PPE who came into contact with the patient’s bodily fluids.

These people have taken long flights while symptomatic, yet no one caught it on the plane.

The largest previous outbreak was in the US, in 2003, the “prairie dog outbreak”. It was readily contained, but sadly mainly affected children:

In 2003, forty-seven confirmed and probable cases of monkeypox were reported from six states—Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin. All people infected with monkeypox in this outbreak became ill after having contact with pet prairie dogs. The pets were infected after being housed near imported small mammals from Ghana. This was the first time that human monkeypox was reported outside of Africa.

https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/outbreak/us-outbreaks.html

It was not until it got loose in a highly promiscuous segment of the gay population that it became difficult to contain. How to do tracing of contacts? “There was this guy from Sweden or Denmark, and another guy — I think he was from Germany but maybe it was Austria, one from Italy and ... Oh, names? You want names? How would I know?” What a nightmare.