New Delhi, India: As the monkeypox virus continues to spread, the World Health Organization (WHO) is considering changing the name to eliminate the stigma and discrimination associated with it.
The WHO’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, stated that the organisation is “working with partners and experts from around the world to change the nomenclature of the monkeypox virus, its clades, and the disease it causes.”
In a paper released last week, approximately 30 scientists from 11 nations recommended for a reduction in “discriminatory” wording used to differentiate the monkeypox virus.
The scientists lobbied for the “urgent need for a non-discriminatory and non-stigmatizing name for monkeypox” in a preprint published on virological.org last week, as well as renaming the virus with numbers.
The experts express their concern in the paper that the “prevailing perception” in the international media and scholarly literature is that monkeypox is endemic in people in some African countries. “However, previous to the 2022 outbreak, it is widely recognised that nearly all MPXV outbreaks in Africa were the consequence of spillover from animals to humans, with only few cases of persistent human-to-human transmissions,” they stated.
“An rising narrative in the media and among many scientists is attempting to link the current worldwide outbreak to Africa, west Africa, or Nigeria,” the experts warn.
They also proposed designating the virus as “hMPXV” in general, with neutral lineages such as A, A.1, A.1.1, and B.1 denoting its diversity.
Tedros stated that the new name would be announced “as soon as possible.”
This isn’t the first time a virus’s name has been changed to reflect its location. When the new COVID-19 and its versions were released, similar issues were expressed. When coronavirus was originally discovered, it was dubbed the China or Wuhan virus by people all over the world, and the appearance of a COVID strain in South Africa resulted in travel bans once more. As a result, the WHO instituted a nomenclature scheme that referred to new varieties as Greek alphabet letters.
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