A new strain of Shigella is disproportionately impacting queer men. Why?

Dr. Carlton Thomas, a gastroenterologist and host of the Butt Honestly podcast, knew something was wrong after having oral sex in the dark room play space of a Fort Lauderdale gay bar last year. Just a few days after returning home from the trip, he had developed diarrhea, dehydration, extreme fatigue, and a 104-degree fever. As a gay GI doctor, Doctor Carlton, as his social media followers regard him, knew his symptoms could only be one thing: Shigella, an increasingly common bacterial infection that can spread through feces, usually via water contamination, unwashed hands, and, yes, certain types of sexual contact, especially when the anus and mouth are involved. Thomas tells The Advocate that he started having bloody diarrhea and eventually needed IV fluid bags, before getting treated with the antibiotic azithromycin. His symptoms subsided over the next 24 hours, but it left Thomas with a desire to raise awareness about the bacterial infection, especially how to prevent its spread.“I was very lucky,” he says. “It felt like I was going to die.” See on Instagram Shigella is the latest emerging sexually transmitted infection to uptick in recent years. Though Shigella has been a known bacterial infection since the 1890s, usually affecting young children in daycare settings, a new drug-resistant strain has been increasingly reported, and the population disproportionately affected has shifted. According to a report published in April in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the flagship publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug-resistant cases of Shigella have increasingly been reported by adult men who have sex with men. While information from the CDC should be taken with a grain of salt these days, given the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle it and the agency’s politicization under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., LGBTQ+ medical experts agree it is a real concern, disproportionately being