California health officials call monkeypox ‘Mpox’ and ‘MPX’, urged to rename disease
top line
Health officials in California will refer to monkeypox as “mpox” or “MPX” on Friday, a local TV station reported.
Public health officials in California have reportedly announced that they will begin referring to monkeypox as: … [+]
important facts
Researchers at RÉZO, a men’s health organization in Montreal, proposed the name “Mpox” at a WHO forum set up to solicit ideas for new names for the disease, director Samuel Milliello told Reuters. increase. See immediately that an emergency has occurred that needs to be taken seriously. ”
WHO recently renamed two subspecies of the disease, previously called the ‘Congo’ and ‘West African’ subspecies, to ‘clade 1’ and ‘clade 2’.
Calls for a name change to the disease grew in May, with the African Foreign Press Association issuing a statement. statement A group of 30 scientists, including some from Africa, wrote a month later calling the name “discriminatory and stigmatizing”.
Last month, New York City officials also asked for a new name. City Councilman Eric Botcher told his CBS News, “Like the name ‘Spanish Flu,’ these names mean a lot.”
main background
For decades, monkeypox was largely confined to Africa, but in recent months it has spread to 94 countries, causing more than 41,000 cases and 12 deaths, according to the WHO, making it a global concern. It got its name because it was first found in a laboratory monkey in 1958, long before the WHO produced guidelines in 2015 recommending against naming it after a geographic place, person, occupation, or animal. The first human case was detected in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the decades that followed, cases spread to her 11 African countries, associated with travel and movement of animals. The outbreak began in the UK, Portugal and Spain in May and has since spread to six continents, with the US, Europe and Brazil being hotspots, according to the WHO.
tangent
Former President Donald Trump’s insistence on calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” in his tweets led to an increase in anti-Asian social media posts, according to a 2021 study.
big number
14,115. That’s the number of confirmed monkeypox cases in the United States as of Thursday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All states except Wyoming have detected cases, with the highest numbers being New York (2,744 cases) and California (2,663 cases). ).No confirmed deaths from monkeypox in the United States
References
WHO wants monkeypox virus to be renamed.
WHO renames monkeypox variants to remove stigma, creates open forum for name changes (Forbes)
