Posted on 07/27/2022 4:20:53 PM PDT by oblomov
Men who have sex with men should consider limiting the number of sexual partners they have to reduce their risk of contracting monkeypox, the director-general of the World Health Organization said Wednesday.
In an apparent shift in WHO messaging about monkeypox, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the burgeoning outbreak can be stopped, but that people in the community where most transmission is occurring — gay and bisexual men, and other men who have sex with men — should take the risk seriously and take steps to help stop spread.
“For men who have sex with men, this includes, for the moment, reducing your number of sexual partners, reconsidering sex with new partners, and exchanging contact details with any new partners to enable follow-up if needed,” Tedros said during the WHO’s weekly press conference.
Previously much public health messaging, including the WHO’s, has focused on the importance of not stigmatizing gay men in this outbreak, rather than on the role the community could play in helping to stop the spread. Initially, in fact, much of the public health messaging was so vague about who was most at risk that some advocates in the community stressed the need for communications that made clear to men who have sex with men that they were at risk.
On Saturday, Tedros declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, doing so despite the fact that a committee of experts he convened to advise him on the issue could not reach a consensus on whether the outbreak rose to the level of a PHEIC.
The unprecedented outbreak, which has spread monkeypox effectively around the globe, is primarily being fueled by transmission among men who have sex with men — especially among men who have multiple sex partners or who have anonymous sex.
That has made some of the tools normally used to control an infectious disease — contact tracing and targeted vaccination — potentially less effective in this outbreak. A number of the confirmed cases couldn’t give contact tracers the names of all of their sexual partners, for instance. Unless contacts can be traced, policies that rely on offering vaccine — which is in limited supply globally — to people who have been exposed to the virus will only help a limited number of those at actual risk.
Keletso Makofane, a social network epidemiologist at Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, said the recommendations from the WHO are appropriate at this time, but cautioned that health officials need to be sure their tone or language doesn’t disparage sex if they suggest people limit their activity. Sometimes, when people talk about halting certain sexual behavior, the implication can be that there is something inherently wrong with the behavior itself, he said.
Makofane is one of the investigators involved with RESPND-MI, an LGBTQ+ community-led survey that’s studying monkeypox cases and providing information about the outbreak and access to treatments and vaccines. The group has also issued guidance for having safer sex during the outbreak, which includes reducing group sex and sex in higher-risk spaces.
“It might be time to hang up the group sex and saunas until we all get shots one and two of the vaccine,” the recommendations say. “This is temporary and out of a love for group sex and those who enjoy it.”
But in mid-May, health authorities in the U.K. reported detecting monkeypox in four men who have sex with other men; none had recently traveled to a country where monkeypox is endemic. In the weeks since, the number of cases has ballooned worldwide.
As of Tuesday, the United States has recorded nearly 3,600 cases of monkeypox across 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Worldwide, roughly 70 countries have reported a total of over 19,000 cases.
DUH!!!
Wow. All those PhDs and MDs and MD/PhDs and this is what they came up with. Shear genius.
To be effective, they would need to drastically reduce hookups to less than 10 a day
Sounds like the WHO is a bunch of HOMOPHOBES.
neuter these poofters
Cease thy faggotry at once!
The WHO still gives bad advice. There are men who sleep with women and men. One of those men can give it to women who then give it to other men and on to other women ad nauseam.
I am not naive enough to believe that people will change their sexual behaviors over this; but this is not AIDS either. It can spread just by skin to skin contact not just via sex.
STOP HAVING GAY MONKEY BUTT-SEX!
No kidding. WHO: Hey fags, quit fagging with other butt pirates mkay?
Call in the bug chasers! Seriously, the height of self hatred must be infecting one’s self with a disease.
It’s mind boggling, isn’t it?
Hopefully this thing can’t be spread by farts. WHO better urge governments to make drawers filters mandatory for all the queers.
All rump-rangers need to stop the rumpy-bumpy until the monkeys all die
Or sumpin like that ..... right?
How about they give up homosexual sex altogether? Just a thought.
Reduce the number of partners ???
It only takes one diseased homosexual ...
How about stop having sex with other men ???
It’s hard to know how there can be bridges.
“For men who have sex with men”
what is this new language I keep seeing everywhere? Are they trying to say these guys are different than homos/gays somehow?
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