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Only Fans Adult Super Star Timothy Champagne Announces He Has Monkeypox

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Adult film and Only Fans superstar Timothy Champagne has announced that he has monkeypox.

In a Tweet Friday morning Champagne wrote: “I have monkeypox, no collabs for a couple weeks. Feel shitty but I’ll try to do solo stuff ASAP.”

Champagne is one of the most famous and popular gay adult film stars who became hugely successful during the COVID-19 pandemic. Known for his near limitless libido and incredible ability to please his partners he has over 803,000 followers on Twitter.

Monkeypox is spreading quickly and has been declared a national emergency but 99% of all cases are among the MSM, men who have sex with men community, that includes gay and bisexual men.

In a controversial op-ed in the Washington Post published Thursday, HIV activist Benjamin Ryan compared the epidemic and his efforts to those of Larry Kramer in the early days of the AIDS epidemic saying that gay men need to change the way we have sex.

Ryan writes:

Today, in the face of the ballooning monkeypox outbreak, gay and bisexual men, among whom almost all 9,492 U.S. diagnoses have occurred, stand at a similar crossroads. A virus transmitting overwhelmingly via sexual contact between men is causing great suffering. And while public health leaders now robustly support gay men, they are still failing to provide timely prevention and treatment and are often fumbling the messaging.

As during the AIDS crisis, gay men cannot wait for the government. We need to change our sexual behavior now. We must do this as an act of empowerment to protect ourselves.

Until a time when monkeypox hopefully abates, this can and should mean reducing our number of partners, skipping sex parties, practicing monogamy and even being abstinent.

Gay men have an awesome history of coming up with such homegrown public health solutions. During the early 1980s, gay activists launched a safer-sex movement that (often contentiously) confronted the heady post-Stonewall liberation of the previous decade. Ultimately, the push helped dramatically reduce sexual risk taking. HIV transmissions dropped among gay men accordingly.

In more recent decades, safer-sex fatigue, along with the arrival of effective HIV treatments and the HIV prevention pill, PrEP, have sent gay men on an overall shift back to higher-risk sexual practices. The rise of hookup apps has further fueled a sexual-liberation renaissance among many gay men — who have been left reeling since monkeypox suddenly reconnected sex with virus-related terror.

5 ESSENTIAL FACTS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT MONKEYPOX

1. It’s caused by a smallpox-like virus

Monkeypox is caused by a virus of the same name that is closely related to smallpox, which has now been eradicated from the planet. Both are members of the Orthopoxvirus genus in the family Poxviridae. Monkeypox was first discovered in 1958 when outbreaks of a disease causing a pox were discovered in monkeys held in captivity for research. It was first seen in humans in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and it is now endemic in Central and West Africa.

In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported 4,594 suspected cases of monkeypox, including 171 deaths (case fatality ratio 3.7%). They are described as suspected because confirmation requires PCR testing, which is not easily available in endemic areas.

2. It causes pustules all over the body

Symptoms normally appear between five and 13 days after infection, although it can take up to 21 days for them to appear. Early symptoms include fever, headache, muscle ache, backache, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion. Once fever has appeared, a rash tends to erupt, concentrated on the face, hands and feet before spreading to other areas of the body. It can spread to the inside of the mouth, the genitals and the cornea. The rash progresses until it forms a scab which falls off, and in some cases large sections of skin can drop off the body.

Although symptoms often ease within a month, one in ten cases can be fatal. Children are particularly susceptible.

3. Diagnosis requires PCR tests

Given that rashes are seen in many other diseases such as chickenpox and measles, WHO recommends diagnosis when identification is necessary. This has to be with PCR testing, they say, because orthopoxviruses produce antigens and trigger antibodies that could look like other related viruses, thus analyses of these cannot pinpoint that the virus is monkeypox.

4. It can spread between people through close contact

The virus generally spreads to people from infected wild animals such as rodents and primates, found in the rainforests of Central and West Africa, but human-to-human transmission can also occur. Similar to viruses like Ebola, transmission only happens in close proximity by contact with lesions, body fluids, respiratory droplets or contaminated materials such as bedding or clothes.

5. There’s currently no cure, but we have a (very old) vaccine

At present, there is no specific treatment recommended for monkeypox by WHO, but there are antivirals licensed to combat orthopoxviruses, such as tecovirimat.

The smallpox vaccine was key to eradicating smallpox decades ago, and this vaccine can be highly effective – 85% – in preventing monkeypox. However, the original first-generation smallpox vaccines are no longer available to the general public. A newer vaccinia-based vaccine was approved for the prevention of smallpox and monkeypox in 2019 but it is also not yet widely available.

 

Find out the latest  CDC strategy and the nearest place in the United States to get the monkeypox vaccine here.

 

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