Women Are Often Misdiagnosed With Monkeypox As A Sexually Transmitted Infection – San Diego Gay & Lesbian News
Monkeypox is one of the diseases that is making a lot of news today. And it has been diagnosed in women and people of the third gender. Moreover, the disease spreads through sexual contact, which remains a concern for the population.
Doctors often end up diagnosing the disease as a sexually transmitted disease, or STD. The Lancet Medical Journal has recently published important findings about how the disease spreads among transgender people and eunuchs.
Facts About Monkeypox
According to recent studies, it has been ascertained that 73% of Monkeypox cases are due to sexual relations.
However, some key differences have been unearthed among the population of women, transgender people, and eunuch populations.
For transwomen, the incidence of contraction of the disease is quite high compared to the eunuchs who may contract the disease outside sexual relations.
It has been widely reported that such instances can arise due to household exposure and from workplaces as well. The same applies to women in general.
These figures were revealed due to research on 136 women, trans, actual women, and eunuchs. The routes of infection in these categories may be traced to anal or genital wounds. However, the disease has gone misdiagnosed several times.
Most doctors and laboratories, at first glance, see it as an STD, which is not the case in multiple such instances. This delay in diagnosis has led to complications in many cases.
Sporadic Outbreaks
Monkeypox has caused a lot of infections in several parts of Africa. Although the rest of the world largely ignored it in the nascent stages, things seem to have gone out of hand in several nations.
The global outbreak differs in scale and severity from one place to another, but the first contact is supposedly a rodent, from who this infection spreads. It has been mainly seen that the disease spreads amongst gay and lesbian genders.
Thus, the symptoms have often confused doctors. There are few options to vaccinate against Monkeypox, and treatment options are also few. The supplies for medicines that treat similar conditions are also quite less. The outbreak seems to have subsided a little due to behavioral changes rather than vaccination efforts.
Although women form a small chunk of the infections, the behavior of the disease-causing virus can change as the disease evolves.
The study has also derived that there is a high risk looming everywhere due to misdiagnosis of the disease and subsequent delay in treatment. Thus, awareness must be increased in all parts of the world apart from continuous improvement in training.
As of now, very few children have been affected. But that is nothing to be happy about. As seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, the virus can mutate at any moment. As of date, a small number of children have contracted the virus, but that is not something to rejoice about.
The children have faced limited chains of transmission, especially from the homes of actual females by birth.
However, pregnant women seemed to have been affected quite a lot. More than 80,000 cases of Monkeypox have been reported so far across 100 nations. Till now, the death count has also been low, with most deaths occurring in severe outbreak areas.
New facts about Monkeypox have emerged today compared to what researchers thought prior. Earlier it was never counted as an STD, but things have changed quite a bit. So, the best thing to do would be to closely watch vulnerable groups, like gay relations or other same-sex gender relations and transwomen categories.