Stigmatisation will prove difficult to detect, control monkeypox – Health Minister warns

An effective way of dealing with the emerging monkeypox outbreak is eliminating any stigma against groups of people or aspects of the disease so that people can assist in disease control.

At a sensitisation seminar on monkeypox reporting on Friday, Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony shared this position while noting that Guyana has built capabilities to diagnose cases of monkeypox while guidelines have been developed.
However, people will not want to cooperate if they feel stigmatised. This will prove difficult for medical officers to conduct contact tracing to determine who was in contact with the infected monkeypox patient.
“If we put the stigma to this thing, the people who are the contacts are not going to cooperate with us, which makes it more difficult for us to be able to contain this. Everybody in this chain, need them to help us. The people who are in contact with the infected patient, we need their cooperation,” the Minister positioned.
Moreover, the senior health official said the Ministry does not want people to be fearful but rather, to understand and make the right choices.
“We want to assure people that even if they get sick, we have the mechanisms in place to help them. Coming into the facility, they can be diagnosed properly. We can test them and then we can treat them.”
One of the epidemiological findings in the monkeypox outbreak was that a large number of cases were among men who share sexual contact with other men. However, the Health Minister asserted that this does not mean other people will not contract the disease.
Moreover, he suggested that health officials need to address this issue without stigmatising sections of the population.
“It doesn’t mean that only men who have sex with men would have monkeypox. We have a whole set of other people who will get monkeypox if they are in close contact with somebody infected…Now, what that means is that if we’re seeing it, we need to address it without stigmatising a part of the population. I think that is important.”
While monkeypox has been detected before, this time around it is causing rising infections in nonendemic zones in the world.
Dr Anthony further added, “What is different with this current outbreak is that we’re seeing more spread outside of what was previously termed the endemic areas. Those areas used to be in the Congo and Western Africa. Outside of these endemic areas, you probably had a few cases and that is it. Now, we’re seeing many more cases spreading to many more countries.”
Dr Anthony pointed out that the animal-to-human jump in diseases is becoming more prevalent, causing increased infections and viruses.
“This is not going to be our last challenge. We are seeing a lot of zoonotic diseases, which occur in animals, jumping across to human beings. We’re seeing many more cases of this. Some of the theories are because human beings are coming closer to animals in terms of their habits and therefore, you can have these jumps,” he shared.