North Carolina still has time to combat monkeypox stigma
You’d assume that, after more than two years of a global pandemic that has killed nearly 25,500 people in North Carolina alone, we would have learned from our mistakes and started to prepare the second a new disease loomed in the distance.
Instead, we seem to be saying the wrong things all over again, and the people who will suffer are the LGBTQIA+ community, particularly Black and Brown men, nonbinary people, and trans women. North Carolina had 53 confirmed cases of monkeypox as of Friday afternoon. The majority of cases are in Mecklenburg County, but cases are occurring in 11 other counties. In spite of the vulnerability we all have to the virus, the group that keeps being mentioned is “men who have sex with men,” something that activists say is creating stigma akin to the early years of the AIDS epidemic.
“Our community is often stigmatized when it comes to public health,” Rebby Kern, the education policy director of Equality NC, tells me. They mention that monkeypox is coming at a specific time, where transphobic and homophobic rhetoric has translated into bills across the country and within our own state over the last few years. Kern and other advocates worry that the current characterization of the disease will only further hateful rhetoric and action.
Currently, the vast majority of cases are being reported among men who have sex with men. Despite this, it’s not a sexually transmitted disease, and there’s a real possibility that other cases are going undetected, whether because people aren’t going to get tested or getting misdiagnosed with something else.
“What we’re seeing across the country is clinicians need to be able to differentiate between monkey pox and herpes and syphilis,” Elizabeth Finley, the communications director for the National Coalition of STD Directors. “They can look very similar in some ways.”
Testing itself, however, has been difficult. The first man to get MPX in Durham County had traveled in Europe, where the disease is more widespread, and says he knew immediately what the sores were when they developed. In spite of the information he had, he says he struggled to get people to listen to him — even with sores on his face.
“It’s a process where I felt like I’ve had to fight at every step of this to get a test or be taken seriously and no one did until the test came back positive,” the 29-year-old, who has not publicly shared his name, told ABC11.
Even the name itself, “monkeypox,” carries a stigma that health care professionals are now having to reckon with. Ashwin Vasan, the commissioner of New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, recently joined advocates in requesting the disease be renamed to reduce stigma against Black and Brown people and the LGBTQ+ community. The virus did not come from monkeys; it got its name from research studies on primates. Vasan reminded the World Health Organization of the racist, homophobic misinformation campaign from the start of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, where people began believing the disease came from sexual activity between Africans and primates.
Right now, the chance of dying from monkeypox is very low. It has happened; there have been five deaths caused by the virus in the last year. All of them have taken place in Africa, where the pox began in the 1970s; in 2017, there was an epidemic in Ethiopia. Now, the virus is finally making its way to Europe and the Americas.
If you do the math, you’ll note the fifty-year space between the discovery of monkeypox and now, and the five years since the epidemic struck Ethiopia. Monkeypox began showing up in the United States in May. A month later, North Carolina had its first recorded case. Yet it seems that any preparation that should have been done in the weeks, months, and even years before then was not carried out.
If we’re going to have another epidemic, we need to learn that singling people out can add to stigma, even unintentionally. We must stop treating illness as a moral failure ; instead, we must ask ourselves if enough was done by the government and the people in power to prevent this disaster in the first place.
This story was originally published July 31, 2022 at 10:54 AM with the headline "North Carolina still has time to combat monkeypox stigma."
