The disease is now called mpox. The World Health Organization said on Monday that the disease's original name was racist and stigmatized.
It will take a while to replace a term that has been used for many years. In 1970 there was the first human case of monkeypox. Captive monkeys were the first to detect the virus.
The World Health Organization said that both names will be used for a year.
Dr. Ifeanyi Nsofor is a senior New Voices fellow at the Aspen Institute and supports changing the name.
According to Nsofor, the physical nature of the disease speaks to the physical nature ofpox. "Eliminating'monkey' removes the stigma that monkeypox comes with and deals with the possible misinformation about how it's transmitted, as it might wrongly suggest monkeys are the main source of spreading the virus to humans," he said.
The WHO decided not to eradicate the monkeypox name immediately. The one-year delay will give the agency time to update many publications. The delay will make it easier for experts to understand the disease that's currently causing an outbreak.
Nsofor cautions against using both names at the same time. He said it was confusing and bad with the name monkeypox.
More than 100 countries were affected by the international monkeypox outbreak in Europe and the United States. Public health experts say that the use of discriminatory language and images online was a result of the disease spreading.
Anti-gay slurs and the name "monkeypox" have been used to describe Black and African people. Rodents are the main source of the disease.
Despite the outbreak's fast growth in Europe and the U.S., the U.S. health officials urged people not to view images of black people.
The New York City Health Commissioner wrote a letter to the WHO's Tedros, urging him to change the name of the disease.
There had been doubts about when it might happen.
The new name doesn't mean the same thing as the virus behind the illness. The official scientific names of Viruses are determined by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses.
The WHO says that the ICTV is considering changing the name of all orthopoxviruses.
The use of an alternative name for the Monkeypox virus has not been discussed recently, according to the data secretary of the group.
"The consensus is that use of the name'monkey' is sufficiently separated from any pejorative context such that there is no reason for any change," he stated.
The WHO's executive director for health emergencies, Mike Ryan, has said that in the face of an outbreak, the central issue isn't the disease's name, but the risk that people with bad intentions could "weaponize" any term.
Ryan said in July that if people are determined to misuse and to weaponize names, then that will continue.
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