The WHO advise for vaccine access seems to be that it be given to gay men (especially those with multiple partners)
Why are gay men at higher risk? Monkeypox is related to smallpox and AFAIK that did not affect gay men anymore than it did everyone else.
If it’s multiple partners, surely straight people with multiple partners are also at higher risk.
A disease may vector in a particular subset in the early stages. Particularly if it is transmitted via more specific means.
A gay person may have brought the disease out from it’s original confines. As it takes close personal contact to transmit, unlike an airborne disease. It will tend to transmit among this persons close physical contacts in the early stages. So they may also be predominantly gay.
If a heterosexual person happened to be the original spreader, then it would be the hetero community that would be initially spreading.
Similar to the initial AIDS spread. It just happened to be a gay person. As far I know.
It has nothing really to do with ones sexual preferences. But maybe a slightly higher possibility of transmission if the anal sex causes some abrasion.
If it continues, there will soon be crossover, if not already to people of any sexual preferences.
It’s not “gay men”. It’s “people who go to raves, get drunk, and have unprotected sex with strangers”. This time, it happened to be gay men.
As I understand it, it’s simply spread by close contact and exchange of bodily fluids and so there is nothing inherent about it that puts gay guys at greater risk. Additionally as I understand it most gay and straight people have approximately similar (and quite limited) numbers of intimate contacts.
However there is a relatively small subset of gay guys that are into relatively extreme levels of promiscuity eg in the “bath house” scene, and that scene has no quantitatively comparable heterosexual equivalent.
Unfortunately monkeypox has got loose in that subset. And that puts the gay community at a risk level above the straight community.
Did you read the article you cited?
The WHO’s monkeypox expert, Rosamund Lewis, said men who have sex with men are the group at the highest risk of infection right now. About 99% of cases are among men, and at least 95% of those patients are men who have sex with men, Lewis said.
If a virus spreads through sexual contact,
Monkeypox is primarily spreading through skin-to-skin contact during sex, WHO and CDC scientists have said. Lewis said the virus will have an opportunity to spread more widely if people do not take precautions by limiting the number of sex partners and anonymous sexual contact.
then it won’t spread into groups that don’t have sexual contact.
It’s got nothing to do with orientation and everything to do with how the virus itself spreads.
I can’t recall specific ones off the top of my head, nor pull them out my ass. But I believe there are some quite interesting situations where disease or poisonings happened to very specific groups due to their peculiar rituals, habits, diet and such.
Legionnaires’ and their disease which in no way is related to being a legionnaire.
Yes I did. Which is why in the title and the body of the thread I wrote “higher risk”. multiple times.
The article says 95% of the cases are those of men who has sex with other men.
Kuru is one such.
Monkeypox isn’t a sexually transmitted disease, but it is spread by respiratory droplet face to face or physical contact. Both of which happen during intercourse (among many other activities). Smallpox spreads the same way, but it’s much more contagious. The reason why it’s suddenly associated with gay men is because a man who happened to be infected with monkeypox attended an even in Europe where alot of men were having sex with eachother and then those men unwittingly infected other men. Protected vs unprotected sex doesn’t make any difference. If that man had visted a female sex worker instead, perhaps at a brothel where she couldspead it to colleagues as well as clients, it would’ve started spreading the exact same way in the heterosexual community.
“Gay” is an identity. “Men who have sex with men” (MSM) is a behavior. The behavior of having sex with multiple partners as described above appears to contribute to transisson. Also, once a disease is in a smaller community, it’s more likely to encounter people with that disease in that community.
I thought that, unlike COVID, the disease can only be spread when symptoms are obvious. Is this true? If so, are people just ignoring weird looking bumps on people that they are f-ing?
Also, and I know it’s very early, but are there any stats on how often it is spread via skin-to-skin contact vs. via the air (like COVID)? Being in Manhattan, I still get very close to strangers on the street or in mass transit. I stopped wearing a mask a while ago, but may need to go back to it.
It’s obviously early as you say, but the overwhelming majority of cases are currently thought to have been transmitted by close contact during sex. There’s a well-intentioned idea that sex is just one type of contact so it shouldn’t be stigmatized as an STD, etc., but it’s starting to look like sex is really efficient at transmitting the virus.
The suspected means of monkeypox virus transmission as reported by the clinician was sexual close contact in 95% of the persons.
[…]
Sexual activity, largely among gay or bisexual men, was by far the most frequently suspected route of transmission. The strong likelihood of sexual transmission was supported by the findings of primary genital, anal, and oral mucosal lesions, which may represent the inoculation site.
A disease from monkeys, spread by gay men. How likely is that? (Sarcasm)
As I understand - with AIDS, the problem was that in the heyday of sexual liberation, there were social scenes where it was not unusual for MSM to occur frequently and with many partners very often, possibly several a night. Once the risks were understood, and proper precautions in place, the risk dropped dramatically. (And it became more a general STD and injection-drug problem)
From what I read in this thread, the problem is that the usual precaution against AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, a condom, will not work if the means of transmission is people in close face-to-face contact breathing in each other’s faces. So the obvious inference is that someone got the disease through some means, and has spread it in a social scene where such contact is more common. Whether the MSM social scene is still like it was - I have no idea about back then or today, except what I read in the media.
For a disease spread by breathing, the question -as we saw with COVID - is how much contact is required to pass to someone - how transmissible is it depending on distance, duration, etc. (That r value they talked about) COVID was very easy to transmit. So far, it looks like this requires much closer contact. However, it never hurts to be cautious.
HIV infection was far and away a male-female sexually transmitted disease in Africa prior to spreading to MSM and to IV drug users, possibly through professional exchange programs between Africa and Haiti and MSM sex tourism to Haiti. Many AIDS rearchers reported that parts of Africa had a full-blown epidemic of “slim” (the local name for HIV based on its wasting effects when untreated) far in advance of the nascent MSM epidemic in the US and Western Europe.
Yes. Diseases exploit a vector that gives them an opportunity to spread, and the highly promiscuous MSM scene in some big cities was tailor made to quickly spread the disease beyond its origins - as was sex workers, and increasing international travel.
Just as the western world’s (and urban life in general) with air conditioning, was tailor-made to spread a disease that was easily passed by being airborne in confined spaces. Crowding, a proclivity for indoors, mixing in multiple crowds, all helped with COVID.
Similarly, water-borne diseases are common in places where properly treated fresh water supplies are not easily available.
It’s an orientation, not an identity.
Whatever it is, it’s not the name of a behavior.