The World Health Organization recommended renaming monkeypox as mpox due to concerns over the original disease name playing into racist and stigmatizing language.
The WHO recommended using both names simultaneously for one year while “monkeypox” is phased out to avoid confusion about a name change.
In an open letter published in August 2022, public health experts proposed to consider non-discriminatory and non-stigmatizing names and classifications of the monkeypox virus clades to contain the outbreak better. Experts also urged media in the global north, where the virus was spreading rapidly, to stop using photos of African patients to depict the pox lesions.
In August 2024, the WHO announced mpox as a public health emergency due to upsurge in cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a growing number of countries in Africa.
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