Monkeypox may be spreading to humans.
According to Brazilian officials, an outbreak of violence against marmosets and capuchin monkeys resulted in the deaths of seven animals.
The stoning and poisoning of wild primate in Brazil is an example of how a disease can have real-world implications.
The spread of monkeypox has nothing to do with monkeys. According to scientists, rodents are the most likely source of the virus, which was first seen in humans in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The monkeys in the colony of lab monkeys were given the honor of being named after them.
In the three months since the first cases of monkeypox were reported in Europe and the United States, public health experts have been urging the World Health Organization to come up with new terminology that might help to clear up any confusion.
"Names matter, and so does scientific accuracy, especially for pathogens and epidemics that we are trying to control," said a bioinformatician who has been pushing the W.H.O.
The organization was urged to move quickly by more than two dozen scientists from across the African continent. They warned that failure to do so risked making it harder to contain the disease.
The media coverage of the outbreak was condemned by the letter, as well as the use of photos of Africans that were scarred by the disease. The virus has been wrongly described as anemic to Africa. Human-to-human transmission in Africa was rare before the current outbreak, with most infections occurring in rural areas. In the context of the current global outbreak, continued reference to the virus being African is not only inaccurate but is also discrimination.
The issue has been acknowledged by the W.H.O. Last week, the organization issued a public call for suggestions after the director general said they would work with experts to find a new name. According to the W.H.O., many experts are impatient because the process has been too slow.
In a news conference last week, officials reported a 20 percent jump in cases over the previous week, with 35,000 cases, with most of them occurring in the Americas.
Many scientists have taken matters into their own hands and have begun using abbreviations such as "hMPXV" and "MPV". A group of experts convened by the W.H.O. agreed to replace geographical references with Roman numerals in the name of two monkeypox viruses.
Monkeypox is much more than just a name. Many experts say the word evokes racist stereotypes, reinforces offensive stereotypes about Africa as a perilous, pestilence-filled continent and abets the kind of stigmatization that prevents people from seeking medical care.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, depictions of African-Americans as having simian features were a staple of American newspapers and magazines. Racist feelings haven't completely faded. During his time as governor of California, Ronald Reagan was caught on tape making derogatory comments about African diplomats. Racist imagery involving apes has been used against Black people many times over the years.
The early days of the AIDS crisis, when Africa was unfairly implicated in the global spread of the disease and many people hid their illness, were similar to the dynamic with monkeypox. The senior vice president for Africa at the Human Health Education and Research Foundation remembers all the people who died unnecessarily.
The fear and shame that comes with having sex with men is reinforced by the fact that most of the monkeys that have been diagnosed with monkeypox are men who have sex with men.
National governments worried about the impacts on tourism or foreign investment can hide an outbreak within their borders. Students from Africa living abroad can be ridiculed.
In Africa and other parts of the world, the naming of diseases has been controversial. In the first few months after its emergence in China, the illness we call Covid-19 was unofficially dubbed the Wuhan virus, a designation that gained currency on social media before finding its way into themainstream. Violence against Asians went up in the US and other countries. The business at Chinese restaurants was no longer going strong. After the W.H.O. gave the disease its current name, Donald Trump referred to it as the China virus.
According to the W.H.O., the virus naming process seeks tominimize unnecessary negative impact of disease names on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare, and avoid causing offense to any cultural, social, regional, professional or ethnic groups.
These best practices for naming new infectious diseases do not affect existing names that have negative associations with actual places and people.
It's a matter of changing the name of the virus. Formal, scientific names are assigned by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. These aren't the same as the common names of Viruses.
It could take a year for the group to decide on a new name for the monkeypox virus. He said that any new species name was likely to incorporate elements of the existing name to maintain a connection with the past. He doesn't know of any viruses that have been changed after being used for a long time.
The debate surrounding the name monkeypox stirs up painful memories of another virus that arrived in the US from overseas and caused widespread fear, shame and finger-pointing. The H.I.V. first appeared on the bodies of gay men in 1981. Gay related immune deficiency is what researchers call the disease. Thousands of gay men would die alone after being ostracized by their families because of the name, which was never official.
Dr. Halkitis lost a lot of friends during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. The problem with those kinds of terms is that they attribute blame, which emboldens hate and undermines the well being of people
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