via the New York Times, Jan 20 (trying to quell the hysteria)
SAN FRANCISCO — In a matter of days, it jumped from a routine press release to a medical controversy.
On Monday, a team of researchers led by doctors from the University of California at San Francisco announced that gay men were “many times more likely than others” to acquire a new strain of drug-resistant staphylococcus, a nasty, fast-spreading and potential lethal bacteria known as MRSA USA300. And sure enough, the study, published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was quickly picked up by reporters round the world and across the Internet, including a London tabloid which dubbed the disease “the new H.I.V.”
But for gay men in the Castro neighborhood here, which was an early epicenter for the AIDS epidemic and a current hot spot for MRSA, the report also seemed to cast an unfair, and all too familiar, stigma on their sexuality.
“The way they keep targeting gays as if gays alone are responsible for it, its like H.I.V./AIDS all over again,” said Colin Thurlow, 60, who is gay and lives in San Francisco. “And we’re sick and tired of it.”
The report also inadvertently offered ammunition for many antigay groups, including the conservative Concerned Women for America, which issued a release on Wednesday citing the “sexual deviancy” of gay men as leading to AIDS, syphilis and gonorrhea.
Read the rest.
Read more LifeLube posts on MRSA.
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