WHO Ask Public to Change Less Stigmatizing Name for Monkey pox
Less stigmatizing name for the new virus as WHO invited public to find a new label for Monkey pox for this can be condemning for some monkeys and African continent.
The public has been enlisted to help the World Health Organization come up with a less derogatory name for monkeypox. Concern over the nomenclature of the illness that started garnering international attention in May has been expressed by the UN health agency for weeks.
According to experts, both the African continent with which the monkeys are frequently identified and the primates themselves, who have little to do with its proliferation, may feel stigmatized by the moniker. For instance, incidences of individuals harming monkeys out of fear of the disease have recently been documented in Brazil.
“Human monkeypox was given its name before current best practices in naming diseases,” Fadela Chaib the WHO spokesperson
“We want really to find a name that is not stigmatising,” she added.
According to the report of Aljazeera, the virus that causes monkeypox was first discovered in 1958 in Denmark research monkeys, hence the term “monkeypox,” however the illness can affect a variety of animals, with rodents being the most commonly affected.
The disease was first identified in humans in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1970; since then, the only places where it has spread to people are a few countries in west and central Africa where it is endemic.
Cases of the disease, which causes fever, muscle aches, and large boil-like skin lesions, began spreading rapidly around the world in May, primarily among men.
According to the WHO, which has declared the outbreak a global health emergency, more than 31,000 cases have been confirmed worldwide since the beginning of the year, and 12 people have died. The report mentioned that, while the virus can jump from animals to humans, WHO experts believe the recent global spread is due to human-to-human contact.
Last week, the UN Health Organization announced that a group of experts it had assembled had already agreed on new names for monkeypox virus variants, or clades. Until now, the two main variants have been named after the geographical regions where they have been observed to circulate, the Congo Basin and West Africa.
Clade I and Clade II were renamed using Roman numerals instead, and a subvariant of Clade II, now known as Clade IIb, is thought to be the main culprit behind the ongoing global outbreak.
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