As July begins, and June’s gay pride celebrations become a memory, some participants returned from the parades and parties with a pathogenic souvenir.
In California, monkeypox cases have more than doubled over the past week in the state. In the Bay Area, officials are scrambling to contain the outbreak.
California had reported 95 monkeypox cases as of Friday, up from 40 the week before, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 460 cases have been reported nationwide as of Friday, up from 150 the week before.In the Bay Area, more than two dozen confirmed or suspected cases have already been reported, with 16 in San Francisco alone as of Friday, though that number is updated only once a week and is almost certainly higher by now, health officials said….Almost all cases so far have been reported among gay or bisexual men, most of whom are believed to have been exposed through sexual or other close contact with someone who was infected. The risk to the general public remains very low, local and federal health officials say.
In Los Angeles County, health officials have identified two large parties as monkeypox “superspreader” events.
Los Angeles County officials have reported limited local transmission of monkeypox, with some recent cases involving people who attended large events here and infected people who haven’t traveled out of state.“There’s been some what we call ‘community transmission.’ That is, it’s not from travelers or people who went elsewhere and contracted monkeypox somewhere else. It’s actually they got monkeypox here in L.A. County, because it was transmitted from someone else here in L.A. County who had monkeypox,” Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said at this week’s Board of Supervisors meeting….“The majority of people who have been diagnosed here in L.A. County with monkeypox have been folks who attended two very big parties,” Ferrer said this week. “So we’ve done a lot of very specific outreach to the attendees at these events.”
Matt Ford, who goes back and forth between both New York City and Los Angeles, contracted monkeypox after being exposed via a friend in LA through skin-to-skin contact. He blasts the response being taken by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
According to Ford, it took the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention three days to give him an official diagnosis when he “already knew” what they would say.“According to my doctor … the CDC is doing a really lackluster job of tracking how many cases there actually are,” he says in a TikTok video.“[This is] due to a lack of testing, and generally not being on top of it.”
On social media, Ford also shared how painful the monkeypox lesions were.
Some of the lesions hurt so much that he went back to the doctor, who gave him pain medication.”That proved really useful because I was finally able to sleep through the night,” Ford said. “But even the painkillers did not fully numb it. It just made it kind of bearable enough that I could go back to sleep.”In the video, Ford is plain spoken as he looks directly into camera and warns others.Matt Ford said he had more than 25 lesions on his body, like this one on his arm.”Hi, my name is Matt. I have monkeypox, this sh*t sucks and you don’t want it,” Ford tells his viewers.
While the World Health Organization has not officially declared the monkeypox outbreak a global emergency, the agency’s monkeypox emergency committee will “revisit its position shortly” due to the “rapid evolution and emergency nature” of the global outbreak and the fact that cases in Europe have tripled since mid-June.
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