It probably should given this is almost verbatim how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic started too. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, monkeypox is a poxvirus—related to smallpox and cowpox. It usually causes flu-like symptoms and blister-like lesions on the body. Typically these lesions show up on the arms and legs, but this time around, they’re showing up more on the genital regions. Although not inherently an STD, according to PBS, the monkeypox virus can be passed through sex and sex-like contact, which means STD clinics, clinics which receive no federal funding, have been at the forefront of it. David Harvey, the director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, says, “This latest outbreak is very burdensome on an already overstretched network of safety net providers.” Why? Well, for one, there’s a significant underreporting of cases because of the slow rollout of testing and vaccines. Yet another sluggish response. If this didn’t sound familiar before, I know it must now.
There is some good news, though. Although newsworthy and certainly not something to ignore, monkeypox hasn’t met both requirements for pandemic status— not yet at least. Kathryn Jacobsen, an epidemiologist, explains that a disease is considered a pandemic when (1) cases are occurring globally and (2) the number of cases is large enough to qualify as epidemic. Currently, there are about 9,200 cases of monkeypox reported around the globe, appearing to affect predominately men who identify as members of the LGBT+ community. Because community transmission can not yet be classified as an outbreak and, for some reason, is seemingly contained to one sociodemographic group, monkeypox responds with a solid “maybe” to both of these requirements. Unlike COVID, which is spread through the air, monkeypox is spread through close contact with an infected person—making it much less contagious than COVID and fortunately, not as deadly either.
However, we aren’t off the hook just yet. Dr. Anne Rimoin, an epidemiology professor at UCLA who has spent the last two decades in the Democratic Republic of Congo working on monkeypox, claims that we have known that monkeypox is a potential problem for decades. Even so, it was only when the virus spread beyond rural Africa that it triggered a global response. She says that monkeypox has been spreading to marginalized and vulnerable populations in Africa for years and we’ve ignored it. So, if we don’t want to address infectious diseases at their site just to confront world health disparities, then we should at least consider doing so to, as Rimoin says, “stay out of trouble rather than get out of trouble.”
This blog post is part of the CIMA Law Group blog. If you are located in Arizona and are seeking legal services, CIMA Law Group specializes in Immigration Law, Criminal Defense, Personal Injury, and Government Relations.
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