Monkeypox will soon be given a new name, although it is not yet clear how. The World Health Organization (WHO) last week announced its intention to change the name of this disease, which is being monitored in more than 40 countries after being contained in Africa for a long time. Why this change, at a time when monkeypox may soon be considered an international emergency by the World Health Organization?
Avoid stigma…
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, has not publicly explained the reasons for his decision. But this may come after multiple concerns about the stigmatization of African countries.
This consideration mainly concerns the strains of the virus. They have already been named after regions or countries in Africa: we are talking about the West African race and the Congo Basin race, the second is much more deadly than its cousin race. In early June, some 30 scientists, many from Africa, wrote a forum to demand that these names be changed. They felt there was an urgent need to “establish a label that does not discriminate or stigmatize”.
A new name that recognizes the current reality of the disease. While for a long time this was limited to ten African countries, this year 84% of new cases have been detected in Europe and only 12% in the Americas.
…and confusion
But why not just change breed names and keep talking about “monkey pox”? First, because it is misleading. The current outbreak shows that the new strain is more easily transmitted from person to person, compared to what has been observed in Africa, where the recorded cases mostly come from animal contamination.
Above all, even in origin, “it is not a disease associated with monkeys,” notes virologist Oiwel Tomori. This name is a legacy of the circumstances in which the disease was discovered in the 1950s: Danish researchers discovered it in a monkey laboratory. But in real life they are usually caught by rodents.
In addition to this misleading aspect, there are again concerns about the nature of the stigma of such a name, researcher Moses John Bockarie.
antecedents
As far back as 2015, the World Health Organization indicated that names given to infectious diseases can have serious consequences when referring to a geographic area or an animal, leading to “cruel reactions against members of certain ethnic or religious communities and the” needless slaughter of food animals”. Not to mention the impact on tourism.
For example, we can mention the names given to the H1N1 flu (“swine flu”, “swine flu”), the Ebola and Zika virus (which originated from a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a forest in Uganda ) or MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome).
Recently, the World Health Organization decided to replace the names of variants of the Covid-19 virus with Greek letters to avoid re-stigmatizing a location or ethnicity. Thus the English variant became the Alpha variant, the South African variant became Beta, the Indian variant became Delta, etc.
These concerns are part of a broader context in which Africa is often the target of diseases that have spread worldwide. As such, the image is also important. Epidemiologist Oliver Restive laments that the media has often chosen the unfortunate illustrations for their articles on monkeypox. He notes that these are often “old pictures of African patients”, while current cases are “much less serious”.
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