And it shouldn't be the next public health disaster.
 | By Alexandra Sifferlin Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
Monkeypox is a relatively straightforward virus. It isn't new, though it is newly spreading in places where it hasn't before. There are even tests and vaccines for it — that's what has made the inability to contain the global outbreak frustrating for so many. |
"Now if monkeypox gains a permanent foothold in the United States and becomes an endemic virus that joins our circulating repertoire of pathogens, it will be one of the worst public health failures in modern times not only because of the pain and peril of the disease but also because it was so avoidable," writes Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, in a guest essay. |
How is it that the world is struggling to contain a virus that many countries seem relatively prepared for? As Gottlieb writes, it does not bode well for the United States' ability to combat pathogens. "Time is running out," he says. "We've now had ample notice that the nation continues to be unprepared and that our vulnerabilities are enormous." |
Part of an effective response to any outbreak is fast and clear messaging about risk and how people can protect themselves. And yet, as Kai Kupferschmidt, a longtime infectious disease reporter, writes in a guest essay, even that has been muddled. |
Monkeypox is currently spreading mostly among networks of men who have sex with men, and public health experts around the world have struggled to discuss the risk in a nonstigmatizing way. Many, Kupferschmidt argues, have tried to avoid talking about it directly. "The result has been confusion," he writes, "with some people wrongly thinking they are at high risk and others not knowing about their very real risk or how to lower it." |
Kupferschmidt, who understands the dangers of stigma personally, as a gay man living with H.I.V., offers a better way forward: Targeted messaging is critical, he says, and it can be nonjudgmental. |
"The solution is to choose words carefully, to engage the communities that are most at risk and to listen to those affected by this disease," he writes. "That work will make the difference between public health and homophobia by neglect." |
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