Monkeypox: a new stigma for the LGBTQ community in Spain

With one of Europe’s biggest gay pride festivals coming up, Spain’s LGBTQ community is concerned that the spread of monkeypox on the continent will lead to an increase in homophobic feelings due to misunderstanding about the disease.

Spanish health authorities reported on Thursday that it already exists 84 confirmed cases in the country, the largest number in Europe.

The list includes a woman, the Madrid region said in a statement on Friday without giving further details.

Health authorities focused their investigations on links between a Gay Pride event in the Canary Islands that reaped about 80,000 people in early May and cases associated with a sauna in Madrid.

However, some people, especially gay and bisexual men, believe that there is some homophobic hysteria in the reaction of the general public to the rare outbreak of the disease outside Africa, where it has long been endemic.

Most of the well -known cases in Europe they occur in men who have sex with men, according to authorities in Britain, Spain, Germany and Portugal.

A leading adviser to the World Health Organization said the outbreak was likely triggered by sexual activity at two recent mass events in Europe.

Gay pride

The outbreak in Spain appears throughout the preparation of the Gay Pride celebration in Madrid, which will take place in early July.

It is expected to be flooded with large crowds, unlike events in the past two years, which have been reduced or canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Organizers said the last Pride party in the city before the pandemic, in 2019, gathered 1.6 million participants, although police put the number at around 400,000.

“Pride is a great party, it’s a moment to hear our voices that brings so many people together,” he said. Associated Press Mario Blázquez, coordinator of health programs for the LGBTQ group in Madrid.

Blázquez said he was concerned that next month’s Pride celebrations were in jeopardy because of overly stringent restrictions being pushed on the part of biases and in part because of fears of another public health emergency in addition to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“We don’t know what will happen. We don’t know what the level of transmission of the virus is or what legal steps can be taken. And then what stigma can be generated with legal steps that sometimes there is discrimination, ”he said.

To date, Spanish authorities have not mentioned any radical public health measures preventing large gatherings.

But Blázquez said that despite the Pride March, he worries that society may make the same mistake it made at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s, when a focus on the disease among homosexual men hid the spread. its to the general population.

“It’s a disease that any member of the population can get,” Blázquez said.

“We are faced with an outbreak that has unfortunately re-affected LGBTQ people and especially gay and bisexual men. What is happening is similar to the first cases of HIV,” he added.

The progression of the disease

The health authorities of Europe, North America, Israel and Australia have identified more than 150 cases of pain in recent weeks.

It is an unexpected outbreak of a disease that rarely appears outside Africa, where it has remained a serious health threat since the first human cases were discovered in the 1970s.

Experts say that anyone can be infected through close contact with a sick person, on their clothes or their blankets.

Most people recover within two to four weeks without being hospitalized. However, the WHO reported that in recent times between 3 and 6% of cases have been fatal.

Health authorities around the world are on the lookout for more cases because, for the first time, the disease appears to be spreading to people who have never traveled to Africa. However, they emphasize that low risk to the general population.

On Thursday, Italy confirmed 10 cases of monkeypox, some but not all of them in people who traveled to the Canary Islands.

“On the issue of sexual transmission, I think we still don’t strictly define it as a sexually transmitted disease,” Drs. Andrea Antinori, Director of Viral Immunodeficiencies at Rome’s Spallanzani hospital.

“So I will avoid defining this disease as sexually transmitted for the time being and, more importantly, define the population – men who have sex with men – as carriers of this disease, because I think it is a problem. also a responsibility from the point of view of not stigmatizing this situation, “he clarified.

“We still don’t understand this disease because we’re looking at a new wave differently to the way we’ve known it historically over the past decades.”

Vaccines

Spanish Health Minister Carolina Darias said on Wednesday that her government had decided to participate in the European Union’s collective purchase of the monkeypox vaccine, which, like the COVID-19 vaccine, would be distributed based on each country’s population. He noted that government health experts are studying how to use the vaccine when it becomes more widely available.

Amos García, president of the Spanish Association of Vaccinology, recommends that the vaccine be given only to those who have direct contact with an infected person and are vulnerable to infection, not the general population.

“We’re talking about a disease that doesn’t have great potential to become an epidemic,” Garcia said, adding that most Spaniards over 40 should be protected by the smallpox vaccines that have been regularly given for decades. that is the past.

Source: The Associated Press

Translation: Elisa Carnelli

CB