Mary Wilson
New member
Jun 10, 2022 10:13 AM EDT
As officials, researchers and activists scramble to control an emerging monkeypox outbreak, many are doing so with another virus constantly wedged in the back of their minds: HIV.
The parallels between the two infections are limited but clear. Although the monkeypox strain now in circulation is infinitely milder than HIV — zero fatalities have been reported out of the more than 1,000 cases so far — it is another virus that emerged in sub-Saharan Africa and has popped up outside the continent largely in men who have sex with men.
“There are, you know, echoes,” said Chris Beyrer, director of the Duke Global Health Institute.
And they pose a similar tight-rope challenge for officials: How do you get tools and information about the disease to those who need it without wrongly implying that only that group is at risk, or publicly associating an unfamiliar disease with an already stigmatized community?
Fortunately, this time around, officials have a playbook to work from — one written and rewritten during the worst missteps of the AIDS crisis, as well as the collaborations that ultimately helped curtail the HIV epidemic and other outbreaks.
... The virus was ignored by the mainstream press for years except when cases were reported in women, children or heterosexual men. The first time the Reagan administration was asked about it, his press secretary jeered: “I don’t have it, do you?” Funding levels remained a fraction, on a per death basis, of what they were for far smaller outbreaks like Legionnaire’s disease.
“By NIH budget calculations, the life of a gay man was worth about one quarter that of a member of the American Legion,” the journalist Randy Shilts concluded in “The Band Played On,” a history of the AIDS crisis. ...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health...ybook-informed-by-failures-of-the-aids-crisis
As officials, researchers and activists scramble to control an emerging monkeypox outbreak, many are doing so with another virus constantly wedged in the back of their minds: HIV.
The parallels between the two infections are limited but clear. Although the monkeypox strain now in circulation is infinitely milder than HIV — zero fatalities have been reported out of the more than 1,000 cases so far — it is another virus that emerged in sub-Saharan Africa and has popped up outside the continent largely in men who have sex with men.
“There are, you know, echoes,” said Chris Beyrer, director of the Duke Global Health Institute.
And they pose a similar tight-rope challenge for officials: How do you get tools and information about the disease to those who need it without wrongly implying that only that group is at risk, or publicly associating an unfamiliar disease with an already stigmatized community?
Fortunately, this time around, officials have a playbook to work from — one written and rewritten during the worst missteps of the AIDS crisis, as well as the collaborations that ultimately helped curtail the HIV epidemic and other outbreaks.
... The virus was ignored by the mainstream press for years except when cases were reported in women, children or heterosexual men. The first time the Reagan administration was asked about it, his press secretary jeered: “I don’t have it, do you?” Funding levels remained a fraction, on a per death basis, of what they were for far smaller outbreaks like Legionnaire’s disease.
“By NIH budget calculations, the life of a gay man was worth about one quarter that of a member of the American Legion,” the journalist Randy Shilts concluded in “The Band Played On,” a history of the AIDS crisis. ...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health...ybook-informed-by-failures-of-the-aids-crisis