Monkeypox Outbreak Linked to Gay Sauna and Festival
Spain announced 23 new cases on Friday, May 20. The Madrid regional health chief Enrique Ruiz Escudero told reports that health officials have been tracing the cases from an outbreak at the now-closed sauna, Reuters reports."The Public Health Department will carry out an even more detailed analysis...
to control contagion, cut the chains of transmission and try to mitigate the transmission of this virus as much as possible," Escudero said.He told The Associated Press that another link may be a Pride event in the Canary Islands that saw around 80,000 people in attendance, the news wire reported on Monday.Elsewhere in Europe, an outbreak of monkeypox in Belgium has been connected to visitors at the Darklands fetish festival in early May, PinkNews reports.At least three cases have been linked to the festival, according to the organizers. “There’s reason to assume that the virus has been brought in by visitors from abroad to the festival after recent cases in other countries,” they said in a statement.While many of the recent cases of monkeypox are among men who have sex with men, Dr.
Agam Rao, a medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, told NBC News that monkeypox isn’t considered a sexually transmitted disease.“It’s probably premature and potentially even harmful to assume that there are only cases within that community,” she said. “There's going to need to be studies related to trying to isolate virus from seminal fluid or vaginal fluid.
There’s really quite a lot of work that would need to be done before we would say that it can be transmitted sexually.”However, the former head of the World Health Organization told the AP, “We know.
