Benjamin Ryan

As an increasing proportion of Americans identify as LGBTQ, leaders in sexual and gender minority health care say that the nation’s medical schools are largely failing to adequately prepare the next generation of doctors to properly care for this population. The need is critical, according to experts in medical education and LGBTQ care. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, as stigmatized minorities, often have difficulty accessing health care that properly addresses their health concerns, that is sensitive to their sexual and gender identities and that is not flat-out discriminatory, researchers have found. “It’s terrible that there’s a whole population of people who […]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning about a rise in extensively drug-resistant cases of the bacterial infection Shigella, a major cause of inflammatory diarrhea.  The agency calls the new form of the stomach bug, which causes the diarrheal condition known as shigellosis, a “serious public health threat.” Evidence suggests the illness is spreading among gay and bisexual men in particular, apparently through sexual contact, both in the U.S. and abroad.  The CDC held a call Tuesday with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the U.K. Health Security Agency to alert doctors about the spread of a […]

During the four months of the monkeypox outbreak, health care providers, researchers and an anxious public have scrambled to determine how the virus transmits, how to prevent it and how the infection plays out in the body. Little attention has been paid to what comes after the infection clears. Following recovery from this skin lesion–causing virus, people often find themselves waiting anxiously over the course of months to see whether monkeypox will leave them with permanent scarring. And in interviews with more than a dozen people who have had the virus and as many health care providers and researchers, NBC […]

For many gay and bisexual men, the sprawling and chaotic monkeypox outbreak has upended a summer that was supposed to be a well-earned opportunity — following the peak of the Covid crisis — to finally have some fun and revel with their gay brothers without the threat of viral infection hanging over them.  Soon after Memorial Day, however, these men, as well as transgender individuals and other queer people — GBTQ for short, because lesbians’ monkeypox risk is remote — were met head-on with harrowing reports about monkeypox’s often devastating and disfiguring effects on the body. Next came anger and frustration over […]

On a sultry Tuesday evening in New York City, Luke Brown excitedly opened a newly delivered bottle of black-and-orange pills, popped his first dose in his mouth, and washed it down with root beer. Having contracted monkeypox this month, the lanky, bespectacled 29-year-old project manager had been suffering from what he called “the most severe pain of my life” for over a week before he finally was able to obtain a course of antivirals — a treatment he hoped would soon clear up his lesions and alleviate his suffering. For Brown, this was cause for celebration. But it was also […]