It resulted in some changing their health behaviour that led to delays in seeking healthcare. It affected their social and sexual relationships, leading to rejection by their partners and social isolation.
This, in turn, had serious consequences for the people affected, especially on their mental and emotional wellbeing. Photo credit: CDC/ Brian WJ Mahy/ Reuters The highly visible disfigurement caused by the monkepox virus could lead to stigmatisation of already vulnerable groups. The situation was worse for men from an ethnic minority background, where racial prejudices and stereotypes added to the stigma. Gay and bisexual men were blamed as the source and cause of HIV spread, even though it was also spread through other routes such as heterosexual sex, from mother to child, needle-stick injuries and contaminated blood products. Some of the stigma was driven by deeply held religious and cultural beliefs in society that unfairly equated their sexuality with notions of immorality and negative stereotypes of promiscuity. There are lessons we need to learn from the HIV/Aids pandemic. This is despite a lot of effort by the LGBTQ+ community, public education programmes and equal rights legislation to tackle stigmatisation.
They have suffered tremendously over the years with the stigma attached to infectious disease, most notably with the HIV/Aids pandemic, and there is still a strong undercurrent of homophobia even in countries with strong LGBTQ+ rights. This is unfortunate as there is a real danger here of further stigma being generated towards this group. Many cases, but not all, that were recently reported were in gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men. The more recent monkeypox cases did not have travel links to countries where the disease is endemic, which raises the possibility that the disease may have been silently spreading in the population for some time before it was detected. Misleading information in the media, and especially social media, could further fuel public anxiety, as was the case with Ebola in 2014. In addition, the public health measures required, such as isolation procedures, healthcare workers suited up in personal protective equipment and rigorous investigations and contact tracing, are all reminiscent of interventions an authoritarian police-state might use for some crime. This “germ panic” is further heightened by the off-putting visible disfigurements caused by the infection, even if only temporarily. In part, this is due to its “exotic” nature, the fear of contagion, and the perception that it is spreading quickly and invisibly in the population. Strange new infectious diseases that the public is unfamiliar with, such as monkeypox, can generate a disproportionate degree of fear in the population. It has attracted a morbid interest from the public and media. Since then, further cases have been reported in over a dozen countries where the disease is not normally present, including several European countries, Israel, the United States and Canada, as well as Australia. The person in question had recently returned to the UK from Nigeria, where they are believed to have contracted the infection. The first case of monkeypox in the current outbreak was reported to the World Health Organization on May 7.
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