His editor, Arthur Levine, echoes those sentiments. It was in high school that I needed to read about relationships between boys.” I searched out books like John Rechy’s ‘City of Night’ and Gore Vidal’s ‘The City and the Pillar’ in my 20s, and they were amazing.
Then I read James Baldwin and was swept away by it. “The Mary Renault books that I read were a big help. “A book like this one would have made life much easier when I was a teenager,” he says.
With it, Grimsley has written the kind of book that might have eased his fraught coming-of-age as a gay man from the rural South. No spoilers, but suffice it to say “Dove” has a happy ending, for a change. One function of creating your own world in a novel is that you can save yourself. "We will be able to stop it before it reaches more vulnerable people and before it establishes itself as a replacement for smallpox.“It’s written for the YA market, but I hope older readers of all backgrounds will respond to the storytelling and recognize those heady feelings of first love,” Grimsley says in a phone interview from his home in Goldsboro, North Carolina. “If we all react quickly and we all work together, we will be able to stop this," she predicted. She said WHO's priority was to stop the current spread of monkeypox before the disease became entrenched in new regions. Lewis said it was also uncertain how much immunity people who were previously vaccinated against smallpox might still have, since that was at least more than four decades ago. Smallpox vaccines are also protective against monkeypox. After smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, countries suspended their mass immunization programs, a move that some experts believe may be helping monkeypox spread now, since there is now little widespread immunity to related diseases. Monkeypox is related to smallpox, but has milder symptoms. WHO's Lewis also said while previous cases of monkeypox in central and western Africa have been relatively contained, it was not clear if people could spread monkeypox without symptoms or if the disease might be airborne, like measles or COVID-19. No deaths have been reported in the current outbreak beyond Africa. People with more serious illness may develop a rash and lesions on the face and hands that can spread to other parts of the body. Most monkeypox patients experience only fever, body aches, chills and fatigue. WHO says thousands of cases are reported from Nigeria and Congo every year. Nigerian authorities confirmed the country's first monkeypox death this year, in addition to six more cases. Aime Alongo, chief of the Sankuru health division in Congo, also said 465 cases have been confirmed, making it one of the worst-hit nations in West and Central Africa. On Monday, authorities in Congo said nine people have died of monkeypox in 2022. Scientists haven't yet determined whether the monkeypox outbreak in rich countries can be traced to Africa, but the disease continues to sicken people on the continent. That marks a significant departure from the disease’s typical pattern of spread in central and western Africa, where people are mainly infected by animals like wild rodents and primates. Last week, a top adviser to WHO said the monkeypox outbreak in Europe, U.S., Israel, Australia and beyond was likely linked to sex at two recent raves in Spain and Belgium. Other experts have pointed out that it may be accidental that the disease was first picked up in gay and bisexual men, saying it could quickly spill over into other groups if it is not curbed.
She warned that anyone is at potential risk for the disease, regardless of their sexual orientation. “We are concerned that individuals may acquire this infection through high-risk exposure if they don’t have the information they need to protect themselves.” “At the moment, we are not concerned about a global pandemic,” she said. “It’s very important to describe this because it appears to be an increase in a mode of transmission that may have been under-recognized in the past,” said Lewis. Rosamund Lewis said it was critical to emphasize that the vast majority of cases being seen in dozens of countries globally are in gay, bisexual or men who have sex with men, so that scientists can further study the issue. LONDON - The World Health Organization’s top monkeypox expert said she doesn’t expect the hundreds of cases reported to date to turn into another pandemic, but acknowledged there are still many unknowns about the disease, including how exactly it’s spreading and whether the suspension of mass smallpox immunization decades ago may somehow be speeding its transmission.