Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, the dean of the Duke University School of Nursing, argued that telling gay men to abstain from sex was not a “realistic option” for preventing monkeypox.
Guilamo-Ramos, who serves at the university in Durham, North Carolina, praised the Biden administration this week for treating the spread of monkeypox as a “national crisis,” but warned that the response from health organizations could be a lot better in a number of areas, including messaging.
The dean argued that healthcare providers should use “plain language that’s fact-based, medically accurate, and empathic,” and that there should be “no blame, no judgment” on those who caught the disease.
“We need guidance that is really practical,” Guilamo-Ramos continued. “You know, too often there’s this sort of dichotomy; it might go something like this: ‘Either have sex or don’t have sex.’ For some folks, the ‘not having sex’ becomes really associated with the idea that the only way you can prevent risk is by not having sex. Well, the truth is that for many people that’s just not going to be a realistic option.”
"…the 'not having sex' becomes really associated with the idea that the only way you can prevent risk is by not having sex. Well, the truth is that for many people that's just not going to be a realistic option."
Duke's nursing dean on Monkeypox:https://t.co/sWN6DpSEwe
— Tim Meads (@TimMeadsUSA) August 17, 2022
The refusal to recommend to gay men that they simply stop having anonymous sex to avoid monkeypox mirrors that of a number of LGBT organizations, including the Oakland LGBT Community Center, who specifically not tried to dissuade people from attending a gay sex festival in San Francisco.
“You can tell people ‘do not do this,’ and I just think that here in this country, people have a problem with that,” Joe Hawkins, director of the group, said. The San Francisco Aids Foundation even encouraged people who had suspected lesions to still go out and have sex, and just cover them up.
Related: Monkeypox Spreads From French Gay Couple To Their Male Dog
Like the CDC and other groups, Guilamo-Ramos focused on reducing “risk” when having gay sex during the monkeypox epidemic. Some “practical guidance” he offered included asking sex partners whether they have a fever, sore throat, or if they are “having problems defecating” before engaging in sexual activities with them.
Most crucially, the monkeypox epidemic needed to be looked at through a “health equity lens,” he argued, claiming it was “economic and social environmental drivers” that led to 98% of monkeypox infections being found in gay men:
“Health equity considerations are what really fuel the epidemic, and they add a lot to the stigma. Imagine, if we fast forward, a country where the messaging is that this is a disease of only gay men, and in particular gay men of color, black MSM [men who have sex with men], or let’s imagine that it impacted also other MSM of color. That’s a very challenging message to roll out, and in many ways could be avoided if we think about it from a health equity lens.”
Valiant News reported on Monday that a dog who tested positive for monkeypox in France may be the first evidence of human-to-animal transmission of the disease. The owners of the dog, a gay couple aged 44 and 27, who are “non-exclusive partners,” reported “co-sleeping” with the animal, who suffered from anal and genital monkeypox sores.
