Source: New York Times and Newsweek
SAN FRANCISCO -- In a matter of days, it jumped from a routine press release to a medical controversy.
The headlines this week about a new "gay" infection were dramatic. FLESH-EATING BUG SPREADS AMONG GAYS, said one Australian newspaper, referring to a study about an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection affecting homosexual men in San Francisco and other American cities. EPIDEMIC FEARED--GAYS MAY SPREAD DEADLY STAPH INFECTION TO GENERAL POPULATION, shouted a press release from the Concerned Women for America, a conservative public-policy group.
But is there a new HIV-like public health epidemic on the horizon? Not likely, says Dr. Henry (Chip) Chambers, coauthor of the study, which was published this week in the online edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine. "This is definitely not the new AIDS," says Chambers, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). "HIV is a life-threatening disease that is incurable and necessitates lifelong treatment," adds Bill Stackhouse, director of the Institute for Gay Men's Health at the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York.
That's not to say that drug-resistant staph infections aren't a serious health problem. As these so-called superbugs become more resistant to common first-line drugs, doctors have been forced to turn to alternative antibiotics, explains Chambers.
But for gay men in the Castro neighborhood here, which was an early epicenter for the AIDS epidemic and a current hot spot for MRSA, the report also seemed to cast an unfair, and all too familiar, stigma on their sexuality.
“The way they keep targeting gays as if gays alone are responsible for it, its like H.I.V./AIDS all over again,” said Colin Thurlow, 60, who is gay and lives in San Francisco. “And we’re sick and tired of it.”
The report also inadvertently offered ammunition for many antigay groups, including the conservative Concerned Women for America, which issued a release on Wednesday citing the “sexual deviancy” of gay men as leading to AIDS, syphilis and gonorrhea.
Another group, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, also cited the report as a way of proving that “homosexual behavior is unhealthy.”
National gay rights groups were quick to label such talk as “hysteria,” even as researchers as the university scrambled to clarify their findings. On Friday, it issued an apology, saying their release had “contained some information that could be interpreted as misleading.”
“We deplore negative targeting of specific populations in association with MRSA infections or other public health concerns,” it concluded. Dr. Chambers said he was surprised by how the report had been spun.
One of the major sore points for some critics was a quote attributed to the report’s lead author, Bien Diep, a researcher who said he was concerned about “a potential spread of this strain into the general population.”
Mr. Diep, 29, said on Friday he regretted not being more thorough in communicating his research to reporters. He said that the term “general population” was part of medical jargon used in the report, which did not translate well.
“It’s really meant to be used to mean all inclusive, including the men-who-have-sex-with-men population,” he said.
Worries about the negative press resonated even as some gay men here expressed concern about the disease itself.
Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which helped finance the study, affirmed on Wednesday that the disease was not sexually transmitted or limited to a certain type of person. It is transmitted through skin-to-skin contact, the agency said in a statement, and is widespread in hospitals and among hospital workers.
Full article: After Linking New Strain of Staph to Gay Men, University Scrambles to Clarify - New York Times
A New ‘Gay Disease’? | Newsweek