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Mpox’s present echoes HIV’s past—it’s a disease that has the potential to affect everyone and is more dangerous within a specific community. The comparison is etched in the brick and mortar of the clinic on the waterfront: Ivan Toms, the man, was both an anti-Apartheid and a gay rights activist.
The challenge with both diseases is how to get information to an already stigmatized group of people in a timely enough manner to halt the ongoing outbreak without making that stigma even worse. The 2022 outbreak showed that our first attempts failed: an article in PLOS Global Health was simply entitled “Monkeypox Is Not a Gay Disease,” recognizing that stigma had quickly emerged around the virus, echoing the early days of the HIV pandemic.
The advantage today is that those dealing with mpox have lessons from HIV/AIDS to follow. One small but meaningful way this has already been addressed is its name: monkeypox was renamed in 2022 to mitigate against racist and stigmatizing language. And as a result of the 2022 global emergency and lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS pandemic, public health officials are better equipped to build coordinated messaging and meet patients where they are.
“[Our] clients overall are now familiar with mpox, as we had the 2022 outbreak and did extensive education,” says Johan Hugo, an HIV clinician at the Ivan Toms Center. The center has integrated mpox services into its HIV care as recommended by the WHO and is part of a network of clinics and government agencies, including the South African Department of Health, that are using common messaging and strategies for mpox. “We work closely with organizations that support key populations to ensure we remain in line with one another,” he says. Such coordination in messaging helps to combat stigma around a disease that is not yet fully understood.
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