- The World Health Organization (WHO) wants to give monkeypox a new name. This is to prevent discrimination or stigmatization.
- The current designation of the virus and the disease is also misleading, as it could incorrectly suggest that it originated in Africa or was spread via monkeys.
There have long been efforts to stop naming diseases after animals or regions to avoid any possibility of discrimination or stigmatization, a WHO spokesman said on Tuesday evening.
Apes merely intermediate hosts
The term monkeypox, for example, could indicate an origin from Africa, the spokesman said. Until May, the virus and the disease were known almost exclusively from Africa, but the name was misleading anyway: the virus was first detected in monkeys in a laboratory in Denmark in 1958. Nevertheless, according to current knowledge, it should be more common among small rodents. The monkeys are only considered intermediate hosts.
When the corona virus emerged at the end of 2019, the WHO also acted quickly to prevent the spread of names such as “Wuhan virus”, named after the Chinese city where it was first detected. On February 11, 2020, the WHO announced that the new virus is called Sars-CoV-2 and the disease it causes is called Covid-19.