Threading the Needle on Monkeypox Communication

This is going to be HIV in the 1980s all over again, isn’t it?

If there is “a tradition like no other” in public health, it must be the fumbling of communications on an emergency situation. If there is “a tradition like no other” in American public discourse, it must be the tradition of blaming ‘the other’ for the problems of the nation. When HIV arrived in the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s, the entire country blamed gay men for the epidemic. Why? Because of fumbled communications.

The Story of HIV, Abridged

In June 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report of a rare fungal infection in five patients. The report describes the five patients as “5 young men, all active homosexuals,” in the first sentence. Why was it necessary to point out that they were homosexuals? I’ll get to that in a minute.

That report was the first hint that something was affecting people to the point where they decimated their immune system when they were otherwise healthy. Soon thereafter, more reports started pouring into CDC, some of which were retrospectively done on people from the 1970s. (It is believed that HIV probably crossed over from a reservoir animal to humans earlier in the 1900s.)