Bonus - A Conversation With an Mpox Patient
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2022
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Matt Ford, an actor, writer, and video producer in LA, had flu-like symptoms a few weeks ago, he never would have suspected mpox if a close contact hadn't told him they'd tested positive. Still in isolation, Ford talks with Lindsay Smith Rogers about his experience with the disease, where we are in terms of treatment and prevention, and how to lessen stigma towards the LGBTQ community where mpox seems to be spreading the fastest.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:16.9 | and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore. |
| 0:19.7 | Our goal is to bring evidence and experience |
| 0:22.1 | to illuminate critical public health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send |
| 0:27.7 | an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhut.edu for future |
| 0:35.4 | podcast episodes. Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call, and today I'm speaking |
| 0:41.7 | with Matt Ford, an actor, writer, and video producer in L.A., who currently has monkeypox. |
| 0:48.1 | We talk about his experience with the disease, the likely vast undercounting of cases, |
| 0:53.2 | and stigma towards the LGBTQ community. Let's listen. |
| 0:58.1 | Matt Ford, thank you so much for being on public health on call. You're joining us from |
| 1:02.9 | isolation in L.A. How are you doing? I am. Yes. First of all, thank you for having me. And I am doing |
| 1:09.2 | okay. You know, I've certainly been better. |
| 1:11.8 | Experiencing Monkey Pox is not fun, but I think thankfully I'm past the worst of it. |
| 1:15.8 | So tell us about your experience with Monkey Pox, the timeline and where you are now. |
| 1:20.3 | Yeah, absolutely. So the timeline, tracing it backwards, I believe I was exposed around June 10th that weekend. I first started noticing |
| 1:30.2 | symptoms and was informed that I had been exposed by someone who tested positive June 17th, |
| 1:36.3 | so the Friday after. And since then, yeah, you know, that weekend, it was the long weekend with |
| 1:41.4 | Juneteenth. I started experiencing intense flu-like symptoms, |
| 1:44.9 | fever, chills, night sweats, cough, sore throat, et cetera. And the week after, those symptoms |
| 1:52.6 | sort of abated, and then I started experiencing a lot of skin lesions. A lot more of those started |
| 1:57.1 | manifesting. And, you know, it's been kind of a journey since then. Some are more painful |
... |
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