More than 21,000 people, in more than 70 countries, have been infected with the virus, which causes painful sores and blisters, among other symptoms. An estimated 98 percent of confirmed cases involve men who have sex with men. This week, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that stigma “can be as dangerous as any virus and can fuel the epidemic”. At the same time, he urged men who have sex with men to reduce their number of sexual partners or to reconsider having new sexual partners “for now”. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which has mentionted At least 745 cases since the first two cases were detected in late May, they also urged men who have sex with men to limit sexual partners, especially casual dating.
“I think when we try to tell people, ‘Stop doing this. Stop doing that,’ doesn’t really work,” Devan Nambiar of the Gay Men’s Sexual Health Alliance in Toronto told CBC News. “It didn’t work on any infections.” Devan Nambiar, director of capacity building at the Gay Men’s Sexual Health Alliance in Toronto, said the stigma of HIV/AIDS still prevails after more than 40 years. (Submitted by Devan Nambiar) It’s important to educate people about risk factors so they can make informed decisions and to be compassionate and concise in messaging, he said, but not to stigmatize people for their sexual activity and behavior — something gay people in particular, have endured since the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, when the disease was widely regarded as a “gay disease”. Lessons learned from that time have been applied to public health care today, but there are criticisms that history is repeating itself with the handling of the monkeypox epidemic. Some advocates attending the International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2022) in Montreal from July 29 to August 2 say health officials must prevent the perception that a viral threat, such as HIV/AIDS or monkeypox, it affects only a segment of the population. “[We] lived this with the HIV epidemic. We certainly saw that with COVID-19. Let’s not do it with monkey pox, shall we?’ said Linda-Gail Bekker, deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Center at the University of Cape Town’s Institute of Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine in South Africa and former president of the International AIDS Society. who organized the AIDS 2022 rally.

Key engagement to combat health threats

The conference returns to Montreal for the first time since 1989, a time when access was limited to drugs that could prolong the lives of people infected with HIV. The majority of those dying of AIDS at the time were gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, trans women, and injecting drug users. WATCHES | Are monkeypox messages missing the mark?

Concerns about public health messages about monkeypox

As cases of monkeypox spread around the world, overwhelmingly among men who have sex with men, there is growing concern that public health messages aimed at this community have missed the mark. The monkeypox virus, however, is not a sexually transmitted infection like HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. it is spread through close personal contact with someone who is infected, but also through direct contact with materials that have touched an infected person’s bodily fluids or wounds, such as sheets or clothing. Bekker believes that without proper communication and engagement with affected groups – be it HIV/AIDS or monkeypox – there is a risk of discrimination that can lead to people not seeking or being unable to access the services they need .

Gay men are taking their health into their own hands

Nambiar, who will also participate in the AIDS 2022 conference, which begins Friday, said gay and bisexual men have long been advocates for their own health care, and we have to “consider a lot of things for ourselves ” due to “indifference” to the LGBTQ community. “We’ve driven work on a lot of things actually, in terms of getting self-checks, getting [on] advocacy, taking autonomy over our well-being, fighting for our rights,” he told CBC News. With monkeypox, he said, gay and bisexual men are speaking out early, demanding paid leave so they can be quarantined and demanding access to testing and vaccines. He said it’s an individual decision to get vaccinated against monkeypox, which about 27,000 eligible people in Canada have done so far, according to PHAC. Some public health authorities have set up pop-up vaccination clinics in locations frequented by men who have sex with men, including gay bars, bathhouses and cruise lines. The response to monkeypox has been “pretty decent” in Canada, Nambiar said, though he can’t say the same for other countries. In the US, which now has the highest number of monkeypox cases on record, the response to the outbreak has been criticized. An AIDS advocate has compared the US government’s initial response to monkeypox to its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the country topped the world in deaths and less than 70 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. LISTEN | Dr. Anthony Fauci on HIV/AIDS, monkeypox and COVID-19: The current 20:50 Dr. Anthony Fauci on lessons from COVID-19, HIV/AIDS and monkeypox We talk to Dr. Anthony Fauci about the COVID-19 pandemic, the lessons he’s learned from fighting HIV/AIDS, and what the world needs to do to bring rising monkeypox cases under control.

HIV/AIDS is overshadowed by converging threats

As fears mount over monkeypox and with the number of COVID-19 cases rising again, health professionals gathered in Montreal worry about whether the world will be able to meet the UN’s 2030 goal of ending HIV/AIDS as a global health concern. There were approximately 38.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide in 2021, with approximately 1.5 million new HIV infections last year. The United Nations said it was a million cases higher than global targets and a sign of “faltering progress”. This week, at the start of a new UNAIDS report Titled In Danger, UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima warned that “the response to the AIDS pandemic has been derailed by global crises”, including the war in Ukraine and international economic instability. “The actions needed to end AIDS are also key to overcoming other pandemics,” he said. During the four days of the AIDS 2022 conference, there will be a push to “fight apathy” in the global fight against HIV/AIDS and a call to “repeat and follow the science”. Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS, holds the 2022 update on the global state of AIDS at a press conference in Montreal ahead of the World AIDS Conference this weekend. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press) “Some of it gets aggressive,” Bekker said, noting that there is an additional challenge with the polarization around science that has emerged in the COVID-19 pandemic. Nambiar said part of this apathy about HIV/AIDS comes from it being “inundated with viruses,” with the mutated variants and subvariants of COVID-19, and now monkeypox. But he said one of the important lessons learned over the years, which certainly applies today, is that a successful response to a public health emergency requires collaboration between governments, public health workers and community organizations. This didn’t happen right away with HIV/AIDS, but he sees it developing now in response to monkeypox.
While there have been remarkable achievements over the past four decades in preventing HIV transmission and enabling people to live with the infections as a chronic illness, Bekker wants to remind people that it doesn’t mean the HIV/AIDS pandemic is over. “I would say we have the hardest mile ahead,” he told CBC News. “We really need to gird our loins, come together as a community and say, ‘What can we do to get to that last mile?’”