Déjà AIDS all over again
“Flesh Eating Super Bug Spreads Among
Gays”
That headline and variations of it appeared
around the world this past month as the mainstream media went into panic
overdrive in response to research showing gay men in San Francisco and
several other urban areas were at a higher risk of infection from a
drug-resistant form of staph infection.
Staph infection is common in hospital
settings and small outbreaks can occur in any intimate environment,
including among athletes using the same shower and training facilities.
This virulent strain, known as MRSA, is particularly gruesome and
resistant to treatment; it can even eat flesh as it embeds deep into the
skin, causing disfiguration and even death.
The headlines were the result of new
research from the University of California at San Francisco concluding
that MRSA had leapt the bounds of hospitals and gymnasiums and was putting
gay men in several major U.S. cities at 13 times the risk of infection as
their heterosexual neighbors.
The hysteria to follow was completely
predictable, at least for anyone familiar with the early days of “the
gay cancer” later known as HIV/AIDS. One London tabloid even dubbed MRSA
“the new HIV.”
The first leap, of course, was to point the
finger at gay men for infecting each other with MRSA the same way we
infect everything else—through sex.
“We think that it’s spread through
sexual activity,” Binh Diep, the UCSF researcher, was widely reporting
as saying. “Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly
unstoppable.”
The only problem is that Diep’s
conclusion about how this staph is spreading was totally unsupported by
the actual UCSF research.
“Specific sexual behaviors were not
assessed or documented in clinic charts,” concludes the UCSF research
report, “we therefore cannot comment on the association between [MRSA]
infection and specific male–male sexual practices.”
The fact is that MRSA has infected women,
children and heterosexual men and can be spread through any form of direct
skin contact, especially involving an open sore or cut. UCSF later issued
a release apologizing for the linkage between MRSA and gay sex, but the
damage was already done.
Anti-gay groups responded much the way they
did back in the 1980s—or, in the case of former Arkansas Gov. Mike
Huckabee, as late as 1992. You remember that Huckabee, now the
evangelicals’ darling in the GOP presidential contest, caught flak for
cynically using the horrors of HIV to declare in his 1992 campaign for the
U.S. Senate that homosexuality “poses a dangerous public health risk.”
Well, fast forward 16 years and the
hysteria surrounding MRSA, and cue Matt Barber of the Concerned Women of
America.
“The medical community has known for
years that homosexual conduct, especially among males, creates a breeding
ground for often deadly disease,” Barber said, blaming television shows
like “Will & Grace” for “glorifying the homosexual lifestyle.”
Ditto Americans for Truth About
Homosexuality, which said the report was proof that “homosexual behavior
is unhealthy.”
“Why aren’t all schoolchildren being
taught that there are special health risks associated with homosexual
behavior and that they should ‘just say no’ to homosexuality?”
You can perhaps excuse, Binh Diep, the UCSF
research who linked gay sex with MRSA, since at 29 he’s too young to
remember the lethal mix of political blame and scientific complacency that
characterized the early AIDS years.
But the same can’t be said for the Bush
administration and its Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
Ironically, Barber wasn’t too far off the mark in pointing the finger at
“the medical community” for reacting too slowly to public health
threats that are originally associated with gay men. We saw it during
Reagan and Bush I with HIV/AIDS, and we’ve already seen it under Bush II
with the return of syphilis.
Now comes staph infection, which despite
last week’s media firestorm is not “new” at all. The gay press was
reporting initial outbreaks of drug-resistant staph among gay men in San
Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., as far back as January 2003—a
full five years before the UCSF report.
What exactly has the Bush administration
and the CDC spent the last five years doing about MRSA? Where were the
public health warnings and aggressive prevention efforts within the gay
community? Why don’t we know more about how MRSA is spread and, even
more crucially, how it can be prevented?
Is the CDC so cowered by the Bush
administration’s abstinence-only attitude that it covered its eyes
hoping MRSA would simply go away? Those are the questions the media should
be asking—rather than feeding a fresh round of public hysteria about
infectious gay men.
Chris Crain is former editor of the Washington Blade, Southern
Voice, and gay publications in three other cities. He can be reached via
his blog at www.citizencrain.com.
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