Monkeypox to be renamed

The World Health Organization plans on renaming monkeypox in accordance with their guidelines on naming pandemics, epidemics, viruses, etc. These guidelines call for not using a geographic area, or animal, to name these viruses. One of the arguments used to justify this was that cases are not restricted to Africa.

From Yahoo! News:

“In the context of the current global outbreak, continued reference to, and nomenclature of this virus being African is not only inaccurate but is also discriminatory and stigmatizing,” the letter states.

Monkeypox was named because it was first identified in 1958 in colonies of monkeys. The first human case of the virus was found in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to the CDC.

Cases have mostly been concentrated to the Congo — which typically sees thousands of monkeypox infections a year — and Nigeria, where there have been more than 200 suspected and 500 reported cases since 2017, according to WHO.

In most cases, monkeypox is mild. After an incubation period of seven to 14 days, the first signs are fever, headache, muscle aches, chills and exhaustion, and the main difference between it and smallpox is that monkeypox causes swollen lymph nodes. Around one to three days after those first symptoms, infected people will develop a rash, typically on the face, that then spreads to other parts of the body.

In the Congo, around 1 in 10 people who contract monkeypox die, but that is not the case in the U.S. — no one has ever died due to the virus here.

Monkeypox can spread through a few methods — direct contact with body fluids or the blisters that pop up on the body can lead to transmission, but the main way is through respiratory droplets. While that might sound familiar after two and a half years of COVID-19, monkeypox does not spread as easily. Someone would have to be in prolonged contact with an infected person to contract monkeypox.

Yahoo! News has the article here.

Category: Society