Discriminatory MonkeyPox name to be retired

By Dana Malcolm

Staff Writer

November 30, 2022 – Mpox is what the Monkeypox disease will be called going forward according to the World Health Organization which decided on a rename citing incidents of racism. The announcement was made on Monday November 28th; three months after the WHO had announced their intent to seek the change.

“When the outbreak of monkeypox expanded earlier this year, racist and stigmatizing language online, in other settings and in some communities was observed and reported to WHO.”

The organization explained. The names of the two clades were changed earlier this year as well. The two clades of Mpox had been named after the areas in which they were found, in the Congo Basin and West Africa.

“Consensus was reached to now refer to the former Congo Basin (Central African) clade as Clade one (I) and the former West African clade as Clade two (II),” the WHO said in August.

The changes come as the globe experiences its largest outbreak in history with thousands of cases across the globe in areas where the virus had never historically presented.

Mpox disease, formerly known as monkeypox disease, was named by scientists in 1970 after the virus which causes it which was first discovered in monkeys in 1958. While the disease has been renamed, the virus that causes it is still called monkeypox virus.

A virus and the disease it causes are separate entities, for example the Spanish Flu disease, is caused by an offshoot of the H1N1 virus and COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-Cov-2 virus While neither of these diseases are named after their viruses Monkeypox was.

It is now up to the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) to rename the virus.

Both Mpox and Monkeypox will be used simultaneously to refer to the disease for the next twelve months until monkeypox is totally phased out.