A volunteer administers a monkeypox vaccine in Los Angeles earlier this year. Photo: Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The World Health Organisation has announced it will be replacing the disease name “monkeypox” with “mpox” after consultations with global experts. In a statement, the WHO said that the outbreak of monkeypox had been accompanied with “racist and stigmatising language online.”There have been calls for several months to find a new name for the infectious viral disease that spread worldwide throughout 2022. In July, the World Health Organisation declared the 2022 outbreak of monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern, with over 53,000 cases in 75 countries. The previous month, more than 30 international scientists wrote on the “urgent need” for a name for the disease that was “non-discriminatory” and “non-stigmatising”. The virus that causes the disease was first discovered in captive monkeys in the 1950s, and the first reports of monkeypox infection in humans occurred in Western and Central Africa in the 1970s. The recent global outbreak was detected without a clear link to Africa. Human monkeypox was given its name back in 1970 when the first report of the virus infection in humans was detected, decades before the WHO published best practices for naming new diseases.The practices state that new disease names should minimise unnecessary negative impact of names on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare, and avoid causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups. Prior to the outbreak, there was already a process underway for renaming all orthopoxvirus species, including monkeypox. This also includes diseases like cowpox, horsepox and camelpox. The WHO said that both mpox and monkeypox will be used simultaneously for one year until the original name is phased out.
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