Mpox: WHO renames Monkeypox citing racial stigma

Health experts said old nomenclature was imprecise, played on racist stereotypes and fueled stigma, making it harder to contain outbreaks the most recent.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The World Health Organization, responding to complaints that the word monkeypox evokes racist tropes and stigmatizes patients, recommends that the name of the disease is changed to mpox. Both names should be used for one year until monkeypox is phased out.

The recommendation, released on Monday, follows outbreaks that began there has been about six months in Europe and the United States, sparking widespread fears that the pathogen is spreading widely across the world.

The virus had been quietly circulating in rural parts of Central and West Africa for decades, but in recent months most of those who have contracted the disease have been men who have had sex with men in other continents, heightening the stigma of a community long burdened by its association with AIDS.

The new name is the result of a months-long review process involving experts from around the world and contributions from the general public.

"W.H.O. will adopt the term mpox in its communications and encourages others to follow these recommendations, in order to minimize any continued negative impact of the current name and the adoption of the new name,” the health organization said in a statement.

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Monkeypox has always been a bit of a misnomer, since monkeys have almost nothing to do with the disease and its transmission. (Rats are the most likely animal reservoir for the virus.)

The name was inspired by a colony of caged laboratory monkeys in Denmark, where the virus originated. was first identified by researchers more than half a century ago. Since 2015, the O.M.S. promoted new criteria for naming infectious diseases. According to the recommendations, names should aim to reduce unnecessary negative impact on travel, tourism or animal welfare, and "avoid offending any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic group".

Critics said monkeypox reinforced ugly Western stereotypes of Africa as a reservoir of plague and sexually transmitted pathogens. Some critics have said it also plays into racist stereotypes, deeply rooted in American culture, that compare black people to primates.

"Names matter, so does scientific precision, especially for pathogens and epidemics that we are trying to control,” said Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, last summer as researchers campaigned for the W.H.O. a new name.

An open letter from Dr. de Oliveira and two dozen other African scientists warned that failure to find a less problematic nomenclature would hamper efforts aimed at containing the disease.

Critics have also taken aim at media coverage of the outbreak, noting that some Western media initially selected photos of Africans atte ints of lesions to illustrate an epidemic almost entirely affecting white males.

Before this year's outbreak, human-to-human transmission in Africa was relatively rare, with most infections occurring in rural areas in people in direct contact with wild animals. The disease can cause high fevers, painful rashes and lesions, but is rarely fatal.

"In the context of the current global epidemic, reference and the continued nomenclature of this virus to be African is not only inaccurate, but also discriminatory and stigmatizing,” the letter reads.

The word monkeypox will not completely disappear. It will remain available on the Internet...