The World Health Organization introduced final week that it’s “working with partners and experts from around the world on changing the name of monkeypox virus, its clades and the disease it causes.”
Monkeypox’s clades, that are completely different branches of the virus’ household tree, have been significantly controversial as a result of they’re named after African areas.
Last 12 months the WHO formally named Covid-19 variants after Greek letters to keep away from stigmatising the locations the place they have been first detected.
Just days earlier than the WHO introduced it might change monkeypox’s name, a group of 29 scientists wrote a letter saying there may be an “urgent need for a non-discriminatory and non-stigmatising nomenclature” for the virus.
The letter, signed by a number of outstanding African scientists, referred to as for the names of the “West African” and the “Central African” or “Congo Basin” monkeypox clades to be modified.
Until a few months in the past, monkeypox had largely been confined to West and Central Africa.
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But since May, a new model has unfold throughout a lot of the world. The letter’s signatories urged naming this model as a new clade, giving it “the placeholder label hMPXV” – for human monkeypox virus.
Out of the greater than 2,100 monkeypox instances recorded globally this 12 months, 84% have been in Europe, 12% within the Americas and simply 3% in Africa, in keeping with the WHO’s newest replace final week.
‘Not a monkey disease’
Oyewale Tomori, a virologist at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, stated he supported altering the name of monkeypox’s clades.
“But even the name monkeypox is aberrant. It is not the right name,” he advised AFP.
“If I were a monkey, I would protest because it’s not really a monkey disease.”
The virus was named after it was first found amongst monkeys in a Danish lab in 1958, however people have principally contracted the virus from rodents.
The letter identified that “nearly all” outbreaks in Africa have been sparked by folks catching the virus from animals – not from different folks.
But the present outbreak “is unusual in that it is purely spreading through human to human transmission,” stated Olivier Restif, an epidemiologist on the University of Cambridge.
“So, it is fair to say that the current outbreak has very little to do with Africa, in the same way that the Covid-19 waves and variants we’re still being battered by have little to do with the Asian bats from which the virus originally came a few years ago.”
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‘Stigmatisation of Africa’
Moses John Bockarie of Sierra Leone’s Njala University stated he agreed with the decision to vary monkeypox’s name.
“Monkeys are usually associated with the global south, especially Africa,” he wrote in The Conversation.
“In addition, there is a long dark history of black people being compared to monkeys. No disease nomenclature should provide a trigger for this.”
Restif stated it was “important to highlight that this debate is part of a larger issue with stigmatisation of Africa as a source of disease.”
“We’ve seen it most strikingly with HIV in the 1980s, with Ebola during the 2013 outbreak and again with Covid-19 and the reactions to the so-called ‘South African variants’,” he advised AFP.
An African press group has additionally expressed “its displeasure against media outlets using images of black people alongside stories of the monkeypox outbreak in North America and the United Kingdom.
“We condemn the perpetuation of this negative stereotype that assigns calamity to the African race and privilege or immunity to other races,” The Foreign Press Association, Africa tweeted final month.
Restif identified that the “old stock photographs of African patients” utilized by Western media normally depict extreme signs.
But the monkeypox spreading world wide “is much milder, which partly explains how easily it gets transmitted,” he stated.
The WHO will announce the new monkeypox names “as soon as possible”, its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated.
The UN company can be held an emergency committee assembly on Thursday to evaluate whether or not the outbreak represents a public well being emergency of worldwide concern – the best alarm it will probably sound.