Health agencies renaming monkeypox to help fight stigma

Key Facts

Multiple advocates and countries had raised concerns over racist and stigmatizing use of the older name, which was first given to the disease after a 1958 outbreak among Danish laboratory monkeys.
It is actually wild rodents — not monkeys — that have been mostly spotted harboring the virus in the wild, and are suspected to be the culprit behind many "spillover" infections of humans from animals.
The WHO and U.S. change comes as some federal health officials had already taken to calling the disease informally as "mpox" over recent weeks in meetings and presentations, even as their slide decks and websites continued to list the then-official "monkeypox" name.
"We will need to ensconce mpox into the public health framework, and the natural space for a lot of that will be the STI programs in the public health departments, clinics, and then HIV clinics," said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, the CDC's monkeypox response incident manager.