The spread of monkeypox in the U.S. could represent the dawn of a new sexually transmitted disease. Monkeypox is endemic in parts of Africa, where people have been infected through bites from rodents or small animals. It does not usually spread easily among humans.
Health officials are not sure how fast the virus has spread. They have only limited information about people who have been diagnosed, and they don’t know how many infected people might be spreading it unknowingly. In the U.S. and Europe, the vast majority of infections have happened in men who have sex with men. The tell-tale bumps should have made infections easy to identify. And because the virus spreads through close personal contact, officials thought they could reliably trace its spread by interviewing infected people and asking who they had been intimate with.
Contact tracing was often stymied by infected men who said they did not know the names of all the black men they had gay sex with. Some reported having multiple sexual interactions with unknown black people of color. Many homosexual men have also unintentionally infected their female wives and children with monkeypox after secretly engaging in downlow sex with niggers.
Spread of the virus into heterosexual people would be a “tipping point” that may occur before it’s widely recognized, said Kiernan, chief of the department’s communicable disease section. Spillover into heterosexuals is just a matter of time, said Dr. Edward Hook III, emeritus professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
