Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Adviser and Director of NIAID, delivers and delivers opening remarks during a Senate Health, Education, Work and Pensions Committee hearing to consider the response federal response to Covid-19 and emerging variants on January 11, 2022 at Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
GREG NASH / POOL / AFP via Getty Images
hide captions
switch captions
GREG NASH / POOL / AFP via Getty Images
Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Adviser and Director of NIAID, delivers and delivers opening remarks during a Senate Health, Education, Work and Pensions Committee hearing to consider the response federal response to Covid-19 and emerging variants on January 11, 2022 at Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
GREG NASH / POOL / AFP via Getty Images
Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, said that now is the time to tackle monkeypox because it is a virus that the health community is familiar with, he told NPR on Tuesday.
In an interview with All things Considered host Juana Summers, Fauci, who has helped lead the fight against HIV and AIDS, said the federal government must against all homophobia related to monkeypox by focusing on the virus itself, not the infected people.
“You reach out to the community. You make it easier for them to access tests, treatments and vaccines, as opposed to making it a situation where people are scared to have access to those things,” he said. .
There are now 19,188 confirmed cases of monkeypox in the current outbreak, with 3,591 cases in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC said the risk of monkeypox in the US is “supposedly low”, but anyone in close contact with a carrier is at risk.
The current outbreak is spreading through person-to-person contact. You can get infections from respiratory droplets from spending too much time face-to-face with monkeypox carriers, World Health Organization warned.
“It’s getting a lot of attention right now because about 99 percent of men have sex with men,” Fauci said. “We have to understand the mode of transmission, the manifestations, as well as the risk to people like children and pregnant women. There is really a huge risk. Right now, thank goodness, we just There is one report of two cases in children, but they are all at-risk populations.”
