Gay and bi men’s health forum addresses MRSA

Link: Gay and bi men’s health forum addresses MRSA, HIV and increasing syphilis rates :: EDGE Boston.

A Feb. 13 health forum at Club Café sponsored by Fenway Community Health proved that there’s a fine line between keeping medical providers informed about issues in gay and bi men’s health and perpetuating anti-gay stereotypes. At the top of the forum’s agenda was Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, more commonly known as MRSA. Last month international media reported on a study showing that gay and bi men in Boston and San Francisco were at higher than average risk for acquiring a multi-drug resistant form of MRSA, which causes abscesses and ulcerations and which if left untreated can be life-threatening, and that among those men it may have been sexually transmitted. Critics at the time argued that many of those stories sensationalized the study and played into the stereotype of gay men as spreaders of disease (see "MRSA media panic," Jan. 24, 2008). Panelists at the Club Café dialogue critiqued the media coverage and talked about the myths and realities of MRSA within the gay community. But the Fenway’s Dr. Ken Mayer, one of the researchers involved in the study and one of the evening’s panelists, said his colleagues at University of California-San Francisco had good intentions in publicizing the study. He said the publicity was aimed at clinicians to make them aware that their gay and bi male patients infected with MRSA may have the multi-drug resistant strain and that they should take that into account when determining how to treat the infection.