Will Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Monkeypox Tweet Further Sexually Transmitted Infection Misconception?

On July 23, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) posted a query on Twitter about monkeypox. The actual query, although, is what sort of reply she was on the lookout for when she posed such a query. Her tweet learn, “If monkeypox is a sexually transmitted illness, why are children getting it,” and included a video that includes Rochelle Walensky, MD, Director of the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC):

The video was a clip of Walensky’s Washington Publish Dwell interview that I lined for Forbes earlier at this time the place Walensky talked about that there have now been two instances of youngsters within the U.S. testing constructive for the monkeypox virus. This revelation then supplied Taylor Greene a launching pad for her tweet query.

Whereas it’s not clear what reply Taylor Greene might have been on the lookout for, the proper reply could be that monkeypox shouldn’t be a “sexually transmitted illness” like syphilis or gonorrhea. Telling your vital different that you simply caught gonorrhea from somebody whereas insisting that you simply didn’t have intercourse with that particular person may elicit a “Whatcha talkin bout” skeptical look. The identical shouldn’t essentially be true with the monkeypox virus. There are many non-sexual methods of catching the virus. The World Health Organization (WHO) clearly states on its website that “Human-to-human transmission may result from shut contact with respiratory secretions, pores and skin lesions of an contaminated particular person or not too long ago contaminated objects. Transmission through droplet respiratory particles often requires extended face-to-face contact, which places well being employees, family members and different shut contacts of lively instances at higher threat.”

People aren’t the one ones who can unfold the virus to you. Different animals can accomplish that as effectively through “direct contact with the blood, bodily fluids, or cutaneous or mucosal lesions of contaminated animals,” in keeping with the WHO. So one other threat could possibly be spending an excessive amount of time collaborating in group hugs with rope squirrels, tree squirrels, Gambian pouched rats, dormice, monkeys, or another animal carrying the monkeypox virus.

Once more none of those aforementioned transmission potentialities require any sort of sexual contact. The truth is, previous to this present monkeypox outbreak, a lot of the documented human monkeypox instances because the first one in 1971 didn’t appear to come up from sexual contact with an contaminated particular person.

All of this doesn’t imply that monkeypox virus transmission can’t happen throughout intercourse. That’s as a result of extended shut bodily contact is usually a part of having intercourse. You don’t are likely to have intercourse with another person after which hope to sometime meet her or him in particular person. Numerous various things can occur all through the shut bodily contact concerned in intercourse reminiscent of respiratory within the different particular person’s respiratory droplets or by accident touching the opposite particular person’s lesions.

Calling something a sexually transmitted illness can have some heavy responsibility connotations. That’s why it’s possible you’ll not inform different individuals that you simply’ve had a sexually transmitted an infection once you ended up catching a chilly or the flu throughout intercourse. Labeling monkeypox a “sexually transmitted illness” proper now might be might be a untimely declaration. Certain testing has discovered monkeypox virus DNA in semen and stool, as I’ve lined for Forbes. However discovering monkeypox DNA in sure physique fluids will be like discovering One Route’s garments on stage. It’s not the identical as discovering the dwell model. The DNA alone can’t trigger infections with out the remainder of the virus identical to One Route’s garments alone can’t sing and dance. Extra research are wanted to find out if the the virus can certainly be transmitted via physique fluids {that a} particularly exchanged throughout intercourse.

One of many penalties of calling monkeypox a sexually transmitted illness has been main of us to mistakenly imagine that they’ll’t catch the virus so long as they don’t have intercourse with somebody contaminated. The truth is, in her July 22 article for Forbes, Victoria Forster, PhD, identified that some headlines and public well being messaging might have inadvertently steered that the one of us in danger for monkeypox are males who’ve intercourse with males, which, after all, is solely not true. Forster quoted Chloe Orkin, MD, PhD, doctor and Professor of HIV/AIDS drugs at Queen Mary College in London, as emphasizing that it’s “necessary to not make individuals suppose it is a illness that may solely be contracted by homosexual and bisexual males, as a result of that is not the case.”

So the danger of Taylor Greene’s Twitter query with none additional elaboration or qualification is that it could additional the misunderstanding that monkeypox is by some means solely a menace to and from a very neighborhood. This definitely wasn’t the primary time that Taylor Greene has rendered her opinions about infectious illness points. For instance, she’s used the time period “medical brown shirts” to explain the Covid-19 vaccination marketing campaign whereas presumably not referring to UPS, puzzled why faculties haven’t been closed to forestall most cancers after Covid-19 led to highschool closures, claimed that the CDC doesn’t suggest 4 polio pictures when, in truth, they do, and on June 4, 2021, despatched a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden demanding solutions about Covid-19 by June 31, 2021. After all, June 31, 2021, has occurred but, so maybe there’s nonetheless time for Biden to reply.