The name “monkeypox”Will soon be changed, considered“ misleading and stigmatizing ”by OMS.
WHO is considering “renaming the virus” for monkeypox, the director-general of the World Health Organization said recently. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesuspromising “announcements as soon as possible” in this regard.
In addition to the name of the virus, the names of the different strains of the virus and the disease itself should be changed.
“Stigmatizing” terms for African countries
Why this change, given that monkeypox has been identified in over 40 countries and could soon be considered an international emergency by the WHO?
The WHO did not openly explain the reasons for its decision, but it appears that it was taken as a result of concerns about the “stigmatization” of language for African countries. This concern mainly concerns the strains of the virus. These are named after regions or countries in Africa: the West African strain and the Congo Basin strain, the latter being much more deadly.
In early June, 30 scientists, many of them Africans, wrote an opinion piece calling for a change in their names, saying it was urgent to implement “a nomenclature that is neither discriminatory nor stigmatizing ”.
A new name would recognize the current reality of the disease. While the disease has long been limited to a dozen African countries, 84% of new cases have been detected this year in Europe and 12% in America.
When walking with the monkey
Why, then, not to change the name of the stems and not the name “monkeypox”. First of all, because it is misleading, it is invoked.
The current epidemic shows that the new strain is more easily transmitted from one person to another, compared to what is observed in Africa, where the cases recorded are most often due to contamination by an animal. Especially, at the origin “it is not a disease related to monkeys”, the virologist Oyewale Tomori declared for AFP.
The name is a legacy of the conditions under which the disease was discovered in the 1950s: Danish researchers discovered it in monkeys in their laboratory. But in real life, it is usually taken from rodents, he writes West France. There are also concerns about the “stigma” attached to it. “Monkeys are generally associated with southern countries, especially Africa,” says researcher Moses John Bockarie.
These concerns are part of a broader context, in which Africa has been frequently targeted as a source of diseases that have spread around the world. “We saw this especially with AIDS in the 1980s, with Ebola during the 2013 epidemic, and then with Covid-19 and with the alleged South African variants, “epidemiologist Oliver Restif told AFP.
In this regard, the image is also important. Restif regrets that the media has often chosen unfortunate illustrations for their articles about monkeypox. These are often “old photos of African patients”, while current cases “are much less serious”, he notes.
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