Daniel: “The gay stigma of monkeypox reminds me of HIV in the 1980s” – Deia

Daniel, a 27-year-old journalist from Barcelona and one of the first patients in Spain to contract monkeypox, explains to Efe that “the stigma that it is a gay disease” reminds him of “HIV/AIDS in the eighties” and warns of the danger that the rest of the population “relaxes” as if it were immune. “There are risk practices, not risk groups,” says the young man, who sees in the treatment of some media and voices of the extreme right a stigmatization of the LGTBI collective taking advantage of monkeypox. “It is not a sexually transmitted disease, you can get it from a hug, a kiss, from sharing a towel on the beach, but it is all part of the stigma, as was the case with the 1980s discourse on HIV/AIDS. It tries to focus and blame people for being sick. It is blaming a group that is already vulnerable for the simple fact of being different”, he points out. In his case, he explains that he went to the Pride festival in the Canary Islands and, after returning, he began to suffer from high fevers that he did not give importance to until he began to see blisters on his ankles like the ones that appeared on television. “I went to the hospital and since there wasn’t much information yet, they took me to the tropical disease box and even put me in a diving suit. The truth is that I felt scared, it seemed that I had something very serious like Ebola”, he narrates. The treatment was based on reducing the fever and staying in strict isolation for 21 days, he points out. “Luckily I had a more or less mild experience, the blisters didn’t hurt; the worst was the swollen lymph nodes, it was the most cumbersome”, recalls Daniel. This young man is clear that in his case the contagion was the result of a sexual practice in the Canary Islands with someone who had previously been infected in Madrid, where it is believed that it began in Spain. Contact list After confirming his monkeypox, he remembers that he had to make the “list” of close contacts to warn them. “It’s cumbersome and uncomfortable, but you have to do it to cut transmissibility,” he says. Asked if he does not believe that massive festivals should be restricted until progress is made in vaccination, he denies that no one should stop doing anything, especially in the collective. “The problem is not the parties, what needs to be combated is the gay stigma. Because if it is believed that it only affects the collective, the rest of the population can relax and increase the contagion there, ”he highlights. “You have to be prudent, take advantage of the fact that you are now vaccinated and not stop doing anything for fear of getting sick. You have to live with it. Diseases exist”, adds the young journalist. That smallpox and the LGTBI community have been linked and stigmatized from the beginning is also partly to blame, in his opinion, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who a few weeks ago said that Until the disease was controlled, gay men had to limit their sexual partners. “Those words were very unfortunate,” says Daniel. SituationFive thousand more a weekMore than 5,000 cases in Spain. Confirmed cases of monkeypox in Spain continue to increase and 5,162 have already been reported, which is 585 more than last week, according to data from the National Epidemiological Surveillance Network as of August 9, published by Health. In Euskadi, this health problem continues to rise and there are already 183 infections registered, the majority in Bizkaia.l Two deceased. To date, most of the cases detected in Spain and the rest of the non-endemic countries related to this outbreak are mild, with a low rate of hospital admission and case fatality, although the death of two young men has already been confirmed in Spain.