Monkeypox could soon have a new name after scientists called for a change to dispel stereotypes that Africa is seen as a disease melting pot.
The World Health Organization announced last week that it was “working with partners and experts from around the world to change the name of the monkeypox virus, its clades and the disease it causes.”
The monkeypox clades, which represent different branches of the virus’ family tree, have been particularly controversial because they are named after African regions.
Last year, the WHO officially named Covid-19 variants after Greek letters to avoid stigmatizing the places where they were first discovered.
Just days before the WHO announced it would change the name of monkeypox, a group of 29 scientists wrote a letter stating that “a non-discriminatory and non-stigmatizing nomenclature” for the virus is urgently needed.
The letter, signed by several prominent African scientists, called for the names of the “West Africa” and “Central Africa” or “Congo Basin” monkeypox clades to be changed.
Until a few months ago, monkeypox was largely confined to West and Central Africa.
But since May, a new version has spread across much of the world. The signers of the letter suggested naming this version a new clade and giving it “the placeholder label hMPXV” – for human monkeypox virus.
Of the more than 2,100 monkeypox cases recorded worldwide this year, 84 percent were in Europe, 12 percent in the Americas and just 3 percent in Africa, according to the WHO’s latest update last week.
– ‘No monkey disease’ –
Oyewale Tomori, a virologist at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, said he supports changing the name of the monkeypox groups.
“But even the name monkeypox is different. It’s not the right name,” he told 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 detected in monkeys in a Danish laboratory in 1958, but humans have contracted the virus primarily from rodents.
The letter pointed out that “almost all” outbreaks in Africa have been caused by people who caught the virus from animals – not other people.
But the current outbreak “is unusual in that it spreads solely through human-to-human transmission,” said Olivier Restif, an epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge.
“So it’s fair to say that the current outbreak has very little to do with Africa, just as the waves and variants of Covid-19 that are still plaguing us have little to do with the Asian bats of which the virus originally came out a few years ago.”
– “Stigmatization of Africa” -
Moses John Bockarie of Njala University in Sierra Leone said he agrees with the call to change the name of monkeypox.
“Monkeys are typically associated with the Global South, particularly Africa,” he wrote in The Conversation.
“In addition, there is a long dark history of comparing black people to apes. No disease nomenclature should provide a trigger for this.”
Restif said it was “important to emphasize that this debate is part of a larger issue with stigmatizing Africa as a source of disease”.
“We saw it most clearly with HIV in the 1980s, with Ebola during the 2013 outbreak, and again with Covid-19 and the responses to the so-called ‘South African variants,'” he told AFP.
An African press group has also “expressed its displeasure at the media use of images of black people alongside stories about the monkeypox outbreaks in North America and the UK.
“We deplore the perpetuation of this negative stereotype that attributes misery to the African race and privilege or immunity to other races,” The Foreign Press Association, Africa tweeted last month.
Restif pointed out that the “old stock photos of African patients” used by Western media usually show severe symptoms.
But the monkeypox that’s spreading around the world “is much milder, which partly explains how easily it’s transmitted,” he said.
The WHO will announce the new monkeypox names “as soon as possible,” said its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The UN agency is also holding an Emergency Committee meeting on Thursday to assess whether the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern — the highest alert it can raise.
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