U.S. Messaging on Monkeypox Is Deeply Flawed
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
As monkeypox cases rise in the U.S., public officials are scrambling to balance concerns about stigmatization with the fact that the disease is largely affecting gay and bisexual men.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
- The cause of the crime wave is hiding in plain sight.
- Put your face in airplane mode.
- The Supreme Court’s extreme power grab
Risk Assessment
In the parts of the world where monkeypox is newly spreading, like the United States and Europe, the people currently most at risk of getting the disease are gay and bisexual men. A recent from the World Health Organization noted that cases in newly afflicted countries have mainly been among “men who have had recent sexual contact identify as heterosexual. from the center of the U.S. outbreak—New York City—show that “the number of monkeypox cases has nearly tripled in the last week, nearly all of them among men who have sex with men.” The infectious-disease and LGBTQ-health journalist Benjamin Ryan notes that though the U.S. is, frustratingly, not collecting demographic details on monkeypox patients, Britain is, and the numbers there are : “Half of men screened for monkeypox tested positive; women, by contrast, tested positive only 0.6 percent of the time.”
