“Something I’m emphasizing to anyone who might be exposed or who does come down with it, is to remember that this is a temporary condition. That certainly helped me when I was at my most miserable,” Matt Ford tells Inside Edition.
Although the World Health Organization has not called the monkeypox outbreak a world health emergency, cases are rapidly rising around the world.
Matt Ford, an actor based in New York City and Los Angeles, is one of them.
“It has been one of the most painful things I’ve ever gone through. At the height of it last week, it was painful to the point that I wasn’t able to sleep most nights,” Ford said.
He’s been speaking out on social media about catching the painful virus, which he says was way worse than getting COVID-19.
“[Monkeypox] was more like an intense flu with really painful skin lesions,” Ford said.
At its worst, the 30-year-old had 25 lesions on his body.
“Thankfully these days because of COVID, most auditions are self tapes. I still have been able to audition. It doesn’t help that I have lesions on my face,” Ford said.
Fortunately, the lesions are now healing.
Ford says he’s speaking out because he's upset that more is not being done to prevent people from catching monkeypox.
More than half of the states are reporting at least one case of monkeypox. California has the highest with 89 cases. New York is next with 74 cases. Illinois follows with 46 cases.
Hundreds lined up for the monkeypox vaccine last week at a clinic in Manhattan, but supplies quickly ran out.
Dr. William Schaffner says monkeypox is primarily spread from “person-to-person through close, intimate, skin-to-skin contact.”
“Something I’m emphasizing to anyone who might be exposed or who does come down with it, is to remember that this is a temporary condition. That certainly helped me when I was at my most miserable,” Ford said.
The federal government has ordered 2.5 million doses of monkeypox vaccine to be distributed around the country.
