To Fight Monkeypox, Remember the Lessons of Covid and H.I.V.
nytimes.comWhen Covid-19 cases were exploding across the United States in early 2020, public health officials remained in the dark, in large part because of major errors in developing a test for the illness.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the manufacturer of the only Covid-19 test then available in the United States, and there were blunders in the design and manufacture of the test that the agency mailed out in February 2020.
This, coupled with the Food and Drug Administration’s initial refusal to allow qualified laboratories to develop or use their own Covid-19 tests, meant that testing was all but impossible to access in the United States in the early weeks of the pandemic.
As the world confronts monkeypox, we must not make similar mistakes in disease surveillance and public communication. While monkeypox and the coronavirus are not the same, there are lessons to be learned from Covid-19 and prior pandemics: We cannot stop transmission of a disease we can’t see, and we can’t help people if we don’t let them know what they’re up against.
