Group Sex and Behavior Change Associated With the 2022 Mpox Outbreak Among Men Who Have Sex With Men in Southern California
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The monkeypox (mpox) outbreak disproportionately affected sexually active gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. To understand community-level changes in sexual behavior, we surveyed individuals in a semi-urban area in Southern California. METHODS: Participants were recruited between October 2022 and April 2023, using palm cards and geolocation-focused online advertisements on social media and dating apps. Eligible participants were male; 18 years or older; those who reported having sex with men; residents of San Bernardino or Riverside counties, California; human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) negative; and currently not taking preexposure prophylaxis. Descriptive analyses were performed. χ2 , Fisher exact, and Student t tests examined the association between group sex behaviors and demographics. RESULTS: We enrolled 91 gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men with a median age of 35 years (range, 18-70 years). Nearly half reported having participated in group sex in the past year. Overall, 48.9% of group sex participants reported changing their sexual behaviors to prevent mpox transmission, with limiting the number of sex partners being the most reported prevention strategy (47.6%). To prevent mpox infection, participants who engage in group sex reported limiting the number of sex partners (34.4%), using condoms for anal sex (16.7%), avoiding crowded social venues (14.3%), and asking partners about mpox symptoms before sex (9.5%). CONCLUSIONS: Survey participants reported modest sexual behavior changes in response to the mpox outbreak. Group sex may increase the risk for mpox, human immunodeficiency virus, and other sexually transmitted infections; therefore, public health messages should include specific discussion of safer group sex practices in sexual health promotion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".