Last month, Sydney MP Alex Greenwich wrote to Butler relaying constituents’ concerns about gay and bisexual men returning from Northern Hemisphere summer holidays, where outbreaks have been traced to parties and LBGTQ festivals.
Barlow is in that category, having spent weeks in the US, which has confirmed around 6,500 cases. “When I was there it opened my eyes,” he said. Some friends I had planned to visit were quarantined with smallpox or as close contacts, while others stood in line for hours to get vaccinated.
loading
Barlow is a Liberal staffer who previously worked for a federal senator and is now a Sydney councillor. He said the federal government should have moved faster to buy the latest vaccines, even if it was not yet approved by Australian regulators.
“It’s almost as if we don’t even look abroad to understand what we should expect,” he said. “For many gay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men, we are now in a situation where a vaccine that has been around for a long time has not been bought. I would have leveled the same criticism at a Liberal government.”
ATAGI has recommended that vaccination be considered for selected groups: high-risk contacts of known cases, men who have sex with men with a high number of sexual contacts (especially those living with HIV, with multiple sexual partners or who attend sexual intercourse on the premises). local) and sex workers.
He especially recommended vaccination for people in these groups who travel abroad to a country suffering from a large outbreak, four to six weeks before their departure.
loading
Although Australia has supplies of the second-generation smallpox vaccine ACAM2000, it is not as effective against monkeypox and is not suitable for people who are immunocompromised or HIV-positive, or who may have sexual contact with people who are.
Professor Gail Matthews, head of infectious diseases at St Vincent’s Hospital and an HIV specialist, said a range of measures, including vaccination and community education, were needed to manage monkeypox in Australia.
“At the moment we’re not sure how big of a problem this is going to be because even though there aren’t many cases in Australia, when we look overseas we see bigger outbreaks,” he said.
Matthews said the HIV/AIDS crisis showed the importance of listening to the needs of communities and that it was important not to stigmatize any particular group because someone might be infected.
With Dana Daniel