Catch Up On The Day’s Biggest News Stories – BuzzFeed News
Anyone can get monkeypox, but the current outbreak is overwhelmingly concentrated among men who have sex with men. Both these things can be true.
CDC data from July 25 shows that 99.1% of US cases are among patients assigned male at birth, and 99% of these men reported recent sexual contact with another man. Additionally, this current outbreak of monkeypox seems to be connected to one identified in 2017 in Nigeria, which was largely driven by high-risk sexual encounters among the younger population.
(At this time, researchers aren’t yet comfortable classifying this monkeypox outbreak as a sexually transmitted infection, which would mean it’s being transmitted via bodily fluids.)
“Based on the data we have, it looks pretty convincing to me that sex is playing a dominant role in the spread of monkeypox, together with the fact that perhaps these patients had sex with multiple partners,” Gerardo Chowell, an epidemiologist at Georgia State University School of Public Health, told BuzzFeed News. “And that’s probably why we haven’t seen as many cases among heterosexuals.”
While it’s true that there are other ways the virus can be transmitted, recognizing these facts is not anti-gay or anti-science, and neither is targeting advice to members of this community given they are the ones who are presently most at risk. “What’s challenging is communicating that while this not a ‘gay disease,’ our limited resources need to go to the people at the highest risk, currently GBMSM (gay men, bisexual men, or men who have sex with men),” virologist Angie Rasmussen said.
Dispatches from Ukraine
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Former clubbers and DJs are partying while restoring war-torn infrastructure near Kyiv, Maria Varenikova reported for the New York Times. “It’s the best rave I can imagine now,” one DJ turned volunteer said.
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Young people near the frontlines of fighting face loneliness, boredom, fear, and violence. “I feel like everything I was going to do became impossible, everything collapsed in an instant,” 18-year-old Oleksandr Pruzhyna told the AP.
Snapshots
A “parentless” 16-year-old was denied an abortion because a court ruled she’s not “mature” enough. In her petition for permission to have an abortion without the consent of a parent or legal guardian, the teen wrote that she was “not ready to have a baby,” and that she was pursuing a GED with the help of a “program designed to assist young women who have experienced trauma in their lives” due to the recent death of a friend.
A Trump supporter has been charged with threatening the FBI over the Mar-A-Lago search. Adam Bies is the first to be charged in connection with an alarming spike in violent threats against federal officials over the FBI search.
A firefighter accused of photographing Kobe Bryant’s body walked out of the courtroom multiple times after begging Vanessa Bryant’s lawyer to “stop describing” the “horrifying” crash scene. At least eight Los Angeles County employees have been accused of taking graphic pictures of the victims’ bodies with their personal cell phones and circulating them among colleagues, family members, and friends.