John T. Brooks, MD, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC answers questions on how to talk about monkeypox with patients and other clinical issues related to the emerging infectious disease.
As monkeypox cases continue to climb across the United States, many clinicians now need to counsel their patients on how to protect against the virus as well as provide treatment.spoke with John T.
I'd recommend using people-first language. That means putting the person at the center of the disease rather than the disease as equal to the person. Instead of saying,"This is an HIV infected man or an HIV infected woman," you would say,"This is a person with HIV." The person comes first, and the condition is part of their life vs the person being defined by the condition.
It's important to recognize that monkeypox can be transmitted through the close intimate contact of sex. But I also caution that you shouldn't be blinded to the fact that it may be transmitted by other means, or that it is necessarily limited to networks of MSM.We recommend a harm reduction approach. We talk about"safer sex," rather than"safe sex." What that means is making choices that are acceptable to you for the amount of risk that you're willing to take.
The most unusual thing is the pain associated with this disease. You look at these photographs of lesions or you see them in person, and if you've dealt with a lot of STDs, you get used to saying,"I'm looking at this lesion and this monkeypox lesion looks a lot like herpes or folliculitis." But the pain that people are describing is so much greater than what someone may experience with those other diseases.
People have the right to have compassionate access to potentially helpful drugs. At the same time, the scientists and physicians are obligated to do no harm, and we therefore also must link compassionate access for a drug to studies examining if that drug really works as advertised and is also not causing harm to people.
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