Monkeypox may soon have a new name because scientists saw it as a disease to dispel African stereotypes.
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced last week that it was “working with partners and experts around the world on renaming the monkeypox virus, its clusters, and the disease it causes.”
Groups of monkeypox, which are different branches of the virus’ lineage tree, have been particularly controversial because they are named after African regions.
Last year WHO officially Nominated Greek letters followed by Covid-19 variants to avoid stigmatizing the places where they were first found.
Just days before the WHO announced the renaming of monkeypox, a group of 29 scientists wrote a letter saying there is an “urgent need for a non-discriminatory and non-stigmatizing nomenclature” for the virus.
The letter, signed by several prominent African scientists, called for renaming the monkey groups to “West African” and “Central African” or “Congo Basin”.
Until a few months ago, monkeypox was largely confined to West and Central Africa.
But since May a new version has spread around the world. The signatories of the letter suggested naming this variant as a new clade, giving it the “placeholder label HMPXV” – for human monkeypox virus.
Reading, WHO warns of ‘real’ risk as monkeypox outbreak tops 1,000 cases
According to the WHO’s latest update last week, of the more than 2,100 monkeypox cases reported globally this year, 84 per cent were in Europe, 12 per cent in the Americas and just 3 pc in Africa.
‘No monkey disease’
Oyewale Tomori, a virologist at Redeemer University in Nigeria, said he supported renaming groups of monkeypox.
“But the name Monkeypox is also absurd. It is not the correct name,” he said. AFP“If I were a monkey, I would protest because it’s not really a monkey’s disease.”
The virus was named after it was first discovered among monkeys in a Danish lab in 1958, but humans have mostly contracted the virus from rodents.
The letter said that “almost all” outbreaks in Africa were spread by people who caught the virus from animals – not other people.
But the current outbreak “is unusual in that it is spreading entirely through human-to-human transmission,” said Olivier Restiff, an epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge.
“So, it is fair to say that the current outbreak has little to do with Africa, in the same way that we are still overcoming Covid-19 waves and variants, they have little to do with Asian bats. The virus originally came out a few years ago.”
‘Africa’s stigma’
Moses John Bokari of Sierra Leone’s Najla University said he agreed with the call to rename Monkeypox.
“Monkeys are commonly associated with the global south, especially Africa,” he wrote Conversation,
“In addition, there is a long black history of comparing black people to monkeys. Naming any disease should not provide a trigger for that.”
Restiff said it is “important to highlight that this debate is part of a larger issue with Africa being stigmatized as a source of disease”.
“We’ve seen this most surprisingly with HIV in the 1980s, with Ebola during the 2013 outbreak and again with the responses to COVID-19 and the so-called ‘South African variants’,” he explained. AFP,
An African press group has also expressed its displeasure against “media outlets using images of black people with stories of monkeypox outbreaks in North America and the United Kingdom”.
The Foreign Press Association, Africa, tweeted last month, “We condemn the perpetuation of this negative stereotype that confers privileges or immunities on African races and other races.”
Restiff pointed out that “old stock photos of African patients” used by Western media usually depict severe symptoms.
But the worldwide spread of monkeypox is “very mild, which partly explains how easily it spreads,” he said.
WHO will announce new monkeypox names “as soon as possible”, its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
The UN agency is also holding an emergency committee meeting on Thursday to assess whether the outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern – the highest alarm it may sound.