Hi everybody, Cheryl Ackison here. Welcome to another edition of the Cheryl Ackison Podcast.

Today, straight, clear talk with everything you need to know now about what's really going on with monkey pox.

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I know you are tired of talk about pandemics, vaccines, viruses, CDC, and now here comes monkey pox.

So you really don't want to think about it especially if you're not at risk for getting it.

But of course, there are mixed messages out there about who is at risk, how bad it could get, what's really going on and who to believe.

Well, today I have an important and authoritative voice on the topic.

He's Perry Halketus of Rutgers. He's Dean of Rutgers School of Public Health.

He's an infectious disease epidemiologist and public health psychologist who does research on infectious disease and the drivers of infectious disease primarily in sexual and gender minority populations.

So he not only has a clear recitation of the facts at hand, but some interesting reflections on the psychology at play. Here we go.

But one of the things that is most interesting to me and something that I've learned over the course of my career is that when we think about infectious diseases, it's often, it's often simplified to the pathogen that we're dealing with.

And in fact, we as human beings are the incubators that provide these pathogens opportunities to replicate and to spread.

And so understanding what drives people, which is often their psychological states is a really critical important aspect of trying to control infectious disease in our world.

Well, fresh on the heels of all this COVID mess. We're all hearing about monkey pox and I know you've been looking in depth at that. Can you just give me an idea of what you foresee based on your analysis today understanding could change, but what you foresee in the near term future with monkey pox.

Yeah, so we were perhaps a little slow in our response during the United States.

When we first saw the cases emerging in Western Europe, we also know that monkey pox, the virus has been endemic to the African continent. They've been outbreaks since 2017.

So in our global society, where we travel back and forth all over the world, it's not surprising to me, but we find ourselves in a situation like this.

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