STD clinics struggle with surge in patients amid outbreak

A surge of patients who need vaccines, testing and treatment for the disease as infections rise are putting pressure on a system already strapped for resources after years of underfunding, physicians say.

Monkeypox is spreading primarily through skin-to-skin contact during sex. Since the United Kingdom first alerted the world to the presence of the virus in May, sexual health clinics across the world have been the eyes and ears of national public health systems, identifying unusual symptoms that diverge from the usual description of the disease in medical literature.

Physicians at clinics in Los Angeles and Chicago, major centers of the current outbreak in the U.S., say they are struggling to keep up with the demand for vaccines, testing and treatment from the communities they serve and are in need of financial support to respond to the outbreak.

The U.S. has reported more than 7,000 cases of monkeypox across 48 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The outbreak has spread swiftly since health authorities in Boston confirmed the first U.S. case in May.

Monkeypox is rarely fatal, and no deaths have been reported in the U.S. But some patients suffer pain so excruciating from the rash, which often develops on the genitals or anus, that they require hospitalization.

“Unless you potentially experienced pain in these sensitive areas, it’s hard to maybe conceptualize what this is, but this is not something that’s cleared up with some antibiotics in a matter of days. People are living with this pain for weeks” said Dr. Anu Hazra, a physician and infectious disease expert at Howard Brown Health in Chicago.

Though gay and bisexual men are currently at the highest risk, public health officials have repeatedly emphasized that anyone can catch monkeypox through physical contact with someone infected with the virus or via contaminated materials such as towels and bedsheets.

“Monkeypox doesn’t care if you’re gay. It doesn’t care what kind of sex you have,” Hazra said. “Monkeypox only cares if you were in close contact with another person that has monkeypox.”

Carpenter said the U.S. has the opportunity to contain the outbreak while it is still mostly limited within a close-knit community of gay and bisexual men, but as infections rise, the risk grows that the virus will start spreading more broadly.

“We’ve now had two in a row, outbreaks that were not managed in a way that allowed them to be contained,” Carpenter said. “This is going to take a coordinated and committed and comprehensive public health strategy that goes from top to bottom and treats it just as seriously as Covid was,” he said.

The Los Angeles LGBT Center knew in early May that monkeypox was going to become a major health issue for the communities it serves after cases reported in Europe indicated transmission was occurring in sexual networks of gay and bisexual men, according to Carpenter.

Staff at the center had never dealt with monkeypox before, so they started educating themselves about the virus. But patients had symptoms that weren’t described in the medical literature, such as single lesions in the genital and anal areas. They didn’t know their first patient had monkeypox until the results came back because the symptoms didn’t fit the textbook description.

“We knew from very early on that this was not going to be behaving like the book,” Carpenter said. “We’re learning not only from the books, but as we go and seeing clients, we’re actually learning what this new…