New York City on Tuesday asked the World Health Organization (WHO) to rename the monkeypox virus to avoid stigmatizing patients who may then be reluctant to seek help.
New York has seen more cases of the disease, which the WHO declared a global health emergency over the weekend, than any other city in the United States, with 1,092 confirmed infections so far.
“We are increasingly concerned about the potentially devastating and stigmatizing impact that messaging surrounding the ‘monkeypox’ virus can have on … already vulnerable communities,” New York Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan said in a letter to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus from Tuesday.
The WHO came up with the idea of changing the name of the virus, which is related to the eradicated smallpox virus, during a press conference last month, a suggestion Vasan mentioned in his letter.
Vasan referred to the “painful and racist history rooted in terminology like (monkeypox) for communities of color.”
Pointing out that monkeypox is not actually primate as its name suggests, he recalled the ill effects of misinformation in the early days of the HIV epidemic and the racism faced by Asian communities, which the former president had invoked Donald Trump calls Covid-19 the “China virus”.
“The continued use of the term ‘monkeypox’ to describe the current outbreak can reignite those traumatic feelings of racism and stigma – particularly for Black people and others of color, as well as members of the LGBTQIA+ communities, and it’s possible that it may do so because of this.” avoid engaging in vital health services,” Vasan said.
Everyone is susceptible to monkeypox, which has long been endemic to central and western Africa but so far has concentrated its spread in Europe and the United States mostly among men who have sex with other men.
The first symptoms can be fever and fatigue, followed a few days later by a rash that can turn into painful, fluid-filled skin lesions that can last a few weeks before turning into scabs that then fall off.
So far, no deaths have been reported in Europe or the United States.
More than 16,000 confirmed cases have been registered in 75 countries so far this year, the WHO said on Monday.
A limited number of doses of a smallpox vaccine called Jynneos, which was found to protect against monkeypox, was given in New York, mostly to gay and bisexual men.
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