August 19, 2024, by Brigitte Nerlich

Mpox, again

On 14 August 2024 the WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that an upsurge of mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a growing number of countries in Africa constituted a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). This was the second time mpox had been declared a PHEIC. The last time was only two years ago.

In 2022 mpox, a disease caused by a virus similar to the one that causes smallpox and endemic in parts of Africa, surprised everybody by sweeping around the globe. On this occasion the disease affected one particular network of people in particular, namely men who have sex with men – the virus had found a niche. As one article said: “While MPOX infection is not limited to gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (gbMSM), the outbreak has become an additional source of stigma and discrimination for them.” This posed communication problems around how to inform people without stigmatising.

Blogging about mpox

Just after the disease emerged here in the UK, I wrote a post in which I tried to get this disease clear in my mind. I talked about naming and stigmatisation, pandemic preparedness and disease management, vaccination, confusion and hesitancy, information, disinformation and misinformation, and science and uncertainty – all topics that are still quite topical.

Then I became interested, as usual, in metaphors surrounding the threat of mpox ‘arriving’ on our ‘doorstep’. I wrote about container, house, threshold and journey metaphors and about the politics of the use of spatial metaphors.

I became even more fascinated by the images of sores and lesions (what I called ‘poxpics’) that symptomatic sufferers began to circulated quite openly in order to destigmatise that which could have stigmatised people even more. It was great to see how an affected community mobilised resources to inform, instruct, warn and deal with stigma.

Social science research about mpox

Following on from these blog posts, Rusi Jaspal and I wrote an article on mpox in the news which explored social representations, identity, stigma and coping. Unfortunately, this article is still stuck in the nine circles of social science and humanities publishing hell.

Other social scientists have been luckier or just better at writing stuff. Some social science research on mpox is now emerging, especially as part of a project led by Jaime Garcia Iglesias  at the University of Edinburgh, which focuses on community organising and information sharing among MSM. There is now also an interesting article about different illness narratives of people who experienced mpox in Australia in 2022. Although Tiktok is being studied in the context of mpox, there is so far no visual analysis, which is a shame.

The current outbreak offers an opportunity to compare and contrast and also to focus more extensively perhaps on issues of inequality and equity, vaccine sharing etc., especially since the mpox epidemiology is changing.

Science and science communication

If you want to keep up with the science you should follow the work of Kai Kupferschmidt, a contributing correspondent for Science magazine writing about infectious diseases and other topics, the epidemiologist Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist, mathematician, and author, and Jon Cohen, a Science magazine staff writer on infectious diseases, outbreaks, vaccines etc.. Jon Cohen and Abdullahi Tsanni have recently published a great overview article about the history and current spread of mpox. There is also a good overview provided by Trudie Lang in an episode of Radio 4’s Inside Science from 20 August, 2024. And James Gallagher, for the BBC, discusses the many uncertainties that still surround this new outbreak.

Image: Mpox virus, Wikimedia Commons

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