Francisco’s symptoms began after he returned home to Mexico City from California in late June. She started with two pimples on her buttocks, but a week later she had lesions all over her body, her mouth so full of sores she could barely speak or drink water.
“The pain was inexplicable, catastrophic,” said Francisco, 44, who asked Reuters to withhold his real name.
Francisco is one of at least 59 cases of monkeypox confirmed in Mexico since May, a number that experts believe could be higher.
In Latin America, Mexico ranks behind Brazil and Peru in the number of confirmed cases of the infectious disease, which has spread mainly among gay and bisexual men like Francisco.
The World Health Organization declared monkeypox a global health emergency on July 23, prompting increased attention from regional authorities, however some doctors and activists in Latin America’s two largest countries they told Reuters the response has been too lukewarm.
“We are not seeing that the necessary measures are taken, nor that monkeypox is given the necessary importance,” said Dr. Sergio Montalvo, a sexual health specialist in Mexico City.
Doctors like Montalvo fear that the authorities have not learned the lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has put health systems in check and has left governments without funds.
The situation is similar in Brazil, where the 970 registered cases represent more than two thirds of the total in the region, according to data from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
Brazil’s Ministry of Health announced an emergency plan against monkeypox on July 28, more than a month after its first case and a day before reporting the first monkeypox death outside of Africa in the outbreak. current.
“We were already receiving news about the outbreak in Europe and the United States, but the government did nothing,” said Vinicius Borges, an infectious disease specialist in Sao Paulo, adding that pain from monkeypox symptoms has had “serious effects” on the physical and mental health of their patients.
The Mexican and Brazilian health ministries did not respond to multiple requests by Reuters for an interview.
Following the WHO statement, the Mexican Ministry of Health published its first advice related to monkeypox since the country confirmed the first case in May.
“In these two months we could have already made important progress,” said Ricardo Baruch, an LGBT+ health researcher who helped organize a protest in Mexico City last week to demand that the government make more prevention efforts, especially in the community. of men who have sex with men (MSM).
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 98% of infections in the current outbreak outside of Africa are among gay and bisexual men.
Mexican health authorities have avoided emphasizing the risks for this group.
“They don’t want to create stigma, but if they don’t talk about it, the measures aren’t going to target us,” Baruch said.
Brazilian microbiologist Natalia Pasternak expressed her concern at the lack of response from Brazil.
“There has been no effort by the federal government to raise awareness in the population about how monkeypox can be contracted, how it is transmitted from person to person, how skin lesions are recognized and how it can be transmitted from contact. skin-to-skin or sexual,” Pasternak said.
On July 25, Brazil’s Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga said the government had “done its homework” to prepare for monkeypox, pointing to four laboratories that test for the disease.
However, “it will take some time to develop testing capacity in Brazil,” said Pasternak, a member of the Sao Paulo state monkeypox advisory board. “We really do not see the intention of the Ministry of Health to do this planning,” he added.
In a possible sign of progress, PAHO said on July 27 that 10 countries in the region had expressed interest in acquiring a vaccine.
Dr. Andrea Vicari, head of PAHO’s Infectious Threat Management Unit, said it was not too late to stop the spread of monkeypox in the Americas.
“Even if we don’t have vaccines, we have other control measures. If we implement them well, we can achieve our goals of reducing transmission.”
