The World Health Organization (WHO) is now recommending member countries to replace the use of the name monkey pox with mpox starting from now. The renaming action was done to avoid the stigma of using monkey names that have a racial stigma since there are many reported cases in Africa. The proposal to change the name of monkeypox was announced last June with the opinion of key scientists first gathered by the WHO.
WHO will phase out the use of the monkeypox name within a year to facilitate classification and ensure continuity of data collection. It is also to avoid confusion because the monkey pox epidemic is still active at this time in several countries.
The name monkey pox has been used since the 1970s although it was originally discovered in monkeys in 1958. At that time associating the name of the animal and location with the virus was commonplace. Since 2015 this practice has been stopped to avoid stigma. This can be seen after the variant of the Covid-19 virus was given a new Greek name instead of the Indian variant and so on to prevent the entire country of India from getting a negative stigma.
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