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Having contracted Mpox in 2022, sexual health advocate Harun Tulunay says now is the time for collective action from governments across the world to stop the spread of the virus.
When Harun Tulunay developed a fever in the summer of 2022, he thought it must be the flu or Covid. But his lateral flow tests kept coming back negative and his fever wasn’t shifting. At the time, Tulunay worked in sexual health and while Mpox cases were slowly on the rise in the UK, he admits that he hadn’t really given it much thought. Several calls to doctors, a trip down to A&E and even an ambulance being called to his home and still no diagnosis. He had suggested to doctors that this could be Mpox, but even then, Tulunay says that doctors didn’t really know what Mpox was.
Tulunay was one of a minority of people who contracted Mpox that resulted in being hospitalised, because of the severity of their symptoms. For Tulunay, it was the pain from the lesions on his skin. In fact, the pain was so intense that he needed to be sedated several times. Was he scared, I ask him over the phone. “It was the fear of the unknown,” he replies. “Once the doctor told me I had Monkeypox [later renamed Mpox], it was kind of a relief, because it meant I knew what was wrong with me.”
He would spend over two weeks in isolation in hospital. Healthcare professionals would come into his room wearing masks, goggles, aprons and gloves; mirroring images in the media that we all recall from the onset of the Covid pandemic. He wasn’t able to eat, because the lesions in his throat were so painful. “I don’t want this to sound dramatic,” he says of his experiences of Mpox. “Because the vast majority of people only have mild symptoms. But this can be serious and we should take Mpox seriously.”
We’re speaking on the phone today, because just days prior to our interview, Mpox is making headlines once again. Whilst cases in the UK and Europe have decreased since the 2022 outbreak, mostly thanks to vaccinations and health education about the virus, the number of cases in certain countries in Africa continue to increase. The spread of a new variant of the Mpox virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has raised concerns, according to the World Health Organization. A person testing positive for the new variant in Sweden, seemingly accelerated the urgency from public health officials to closely monitor for any new Mpox cases in Europe.
“Mpox has been around for decades,” says Tulunay. “But it’s only when we start seeing cases in the Western world do people want to start doing something about it. We don’t really care about what happens to the other human being until it comes to our doorstep, which is a little bit upsetting, isn’t it?”
What was his initial response when he heard about the latest outbreak of Mpox, I venture. “To be honest with you, a little bit anxious,” he says. “The reason for my anxiety was that our community would be under the spotlight again.” As someone who is living with HIV and works in sexual health, Tulunay is all too aware of the impact of the HIV epidemic on the LGBTQ+ community.
The Mpox outbreak two years ago saw a resurgence in stigmatisation towards the queer community, something which Tulunay fears could happen again. Although Mpox can be contracted by anyone, the 2022 outbreak disproportionately affected men who have sex with men. The virus, which is spread by close contact with a person who has Mpox, such as skin-to-skin contact during sex, saw it being labelled as a sexually transmitted infection and the weight of responsibility for testing and treatment fell on the shoulders of sexual health clinics. “It was basically labelled as a ‘gay disease’,” he argues, referencing some of the homophobic undertones that accompanied reporting from certain media outlets at the time.
Once he was discharged from hospital, he spoke with his HIV doctors. Given that he was part of a minority of cases to be hospitalised, Tulunay wondered if his HIV status had a part to play in how severe his symptoms were. “They were bamboozled!” he says of his doctors’ reaction. “My immune system has never been better, and yet my symptoms were still so severe. We still don’t know why that was the case.”
As someone who is an activist in the field of sexual health and HIV, Tulunay understands the power of using his voice. He fled his home country of Turkey, because of the homophobic abuse he faced there. Tulunay tells me how he was attacked for being gay, and sent to camps that practise so-called gay conversion therapy. He came to England to start a new life, only to test positive for HIV in 2016 and face discrimination and abuse from both outside and within the queer community.
When it came to Mpox, Tulunay feared that history was repeating itself. “It felt like the whole story was basically the same as HIV in the eighties and nineties,” he says of both the resurgence of stigma towards primarily men who have sex with men, and of the lack of education and access to prevention in the form of vaccinations.
It was this that motivated him to start talking about his own experiences of Mpox. “You’d better start sharing this with other people,” he thought to himself. “You didn’t know anything about this before, you were hospitalised, people need to know about this.” So he began sharing his journey with Mpox on social media, as well as doing press interviews. It was his way, Tulunay explains, of using his voice for good. “It doesn’t really matter about someone’s sexuality or gender. It’s just a disease,” he says. “I just wanted to teach people about Mpox, and empower them with information about it.”
Wealthy nations stockpiling vaccines, coupled with the cost that Big Pharma companies are charging to supply the most at risk countries with vaccinations, results in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo struggling to contain the spread of the virus. I ask him what message he has to governments when it comes to the possibility of another Mpox outbreak here in Europe. “I would say that it’s time for us all to stop being so selfish and see the bigger picture,” he says, alluding to the need for collective action when it comes to tackling the ongoing health inequalities that exist.
I sense that he is somewhat optimistic, though. Despite his negative experiences of Mpox, he also reasons that now healthcare professionals and public health officials know more about the virus, more can be done to help prevent further outbreaks. “Knowledge is power,” he says. “We have the tools to stop Mpox, so I don’t want people to be scared that this is going to be like another Covid pandemic.”
Harun Tulunay is a sexual health and HIV advocate.
