In article <t2i699$3l2vo$148@news.freedyn.de>
<governor.swill@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's a FAGGOT SPREAD DISEASE! Nothing will change that.
>

Calling the disease something different won�t fix its bad vibes.

Joseph Osmundson, a microbiologist at NYU, was walking home
recently in New York City when a stranger abruptly shouted
�Monkeypox!� at him. He wasn�t infected with the virus, which
has been spreading largely through intimate contact between men,
nor did he have the characteristic skin lesions. So he must have
been targeted for this catcall, he told me, on account of his
being �visibly gay.� From his perspective, the name of the
disease has made a painful outbreak worse. �Not only is this
virus horrible, and people are suffering,� he said, �but it�s
also fucking called monkeypox. Are you kidding?�

Since the global crisis started in the spring, efforts to
contain the spread of monkeypox have developed in parallel with
efforts to change its formal identity. In June, more than two
dozen virologists and public-health experts put out a call for a
�neutral, non-discriminatory and non-stigmitizing� nomenclature
for the virus and its subtypes; World Health Organization
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus responded by
announcing a formal process to create one. A month later, with
monkeypox still mired in linguistic purgatory, the health
commissioner of New York City issued an open letter to
Ghebreyesus warning that a �public health failure of words with
potentially catastrophic consequences� was imminent. �Words can
save lives or put them at further risk,� the letter said. �The
WHO must act in this moment before it is too late.�

As a practicing physician�and a gay one at that�I've felt
devastated by the clumsy public-health response to monkeypox.
The delays in rolling out tests, treatments, vaccines, and
contact tracing have been a months-long source of frustration.
But the name of the disease has never bothered me, let alone
engendered premonitions of catastrophe. Sure, monkeypox sounded
odd when I first started hearing it in conversation. But that
feeling quickly went away as doctors had to deal with the
scourge itself, and with a public-health failure of actions.
After seeing lives literally put at risk by our government, I
have a hard time believing that the word monkeypox can really do
the same.

I�ve been told I�m wrong about this point, many times and by
many different people. Some say the term is silly, and that it
makes a dreadful ailment seem unimportant. Others claim that
it�s too scary, and causes panic we don�t need. I�ve also heard
that monkeypox is racist, that it�s homophobic, and that,
actually, it�s causing harm to monkeys. A single name for a
disease is said to be, somehow, the source of all this evil. But
medicine is full of terms that sound funny or disgusting or
obscene. One can find �hairy cell leukemia� and �fish scale
disease� and �cat cry syndrome� on the books. A common viral
illness related to monkeypox is termed �molluscum contagiosum,�
which seems like a Harry Potter curse; and then there�s �maple
syrup urine disease��much too sweet of a label for a
debilitating condition. All these names are weird, but they
hardly seem offensive. Why should monkeypox be different?

The name for the current outbreak is, at the very least, inapt.
It �genuinely bothers me every time I use it,� Neil Stone, an
infectious-disease physician in the United Kingdom, told me. In
addition to finding the name unserious and possibly racist, he�s
hung up on the fact that monkeypox doesn�t actually have much to
do with monkeys. Although the disease was first identified in
primates, in 1958, small mammals like squirrels and rats are now
thought to be more important viral reservoirs.

The subtypes of the monkeypox virus, called clades, could be
even more misleading. These were originally named after the
regions in Africa where they�d first been identified, but the
present crisis did not emerge from any of those places,
Christian Happi, the director of the African Center of
Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases in Nigeria, told
me. If we were being less hypocritical, he suggested, the 2022
epidemic would be attributed not to the West African clade of
monkeypox but to the �European� clade�in reference to the
continent where cases were first identified this year. Happi,
who was the lead author on the demand for a less stigmatizing
nomenclature, also takes issue with some media outlets� use of
archival photos of Africans to illustrate a disease that now is
occurring in white men.

Since I spoke with Happi, a group of virologists and public-
health experts convened by the WHO reached an agreement to
rename the clades. A statement issued Friday said the monkeypox
subvariant behind this year�s global outbreak would henceforth
fall within �Clade IIb.� That shift will be most significant
within the scientific community, but the more pressing question,
of what to do about the term on all of our lips, is unresolved.
What will monkeypox become?

Surely any change would have to be in line with the �Best
Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases,� put
out by the WHO in 2015. Those guidelines are designed to
minimize word-based harm to �trade, travel, tourism or animal
welfare,� as well as to �cultural, social, national, regional,
professional or ethnic groups.� To that end, they say, names
should exclude all stigmatizing references to specific people
(e.g., �Creutzfeld-Jakob disease�), occupations (�Legionnaires�
disease�), or places (�Lyme disease�). Animal-based names, such
as �swine flu� and �paralytic shellfish poisoning,� are also
verboten.

When I talked with Stone, he tossed out �human orthopoxvirus
syndrome,� or �HOPS� for short, as a possible alternative for
monkeypox. Happi said that �mundopox,� from the Spanish for
world, was another. But if the WHO is to follow its own rules to
the letter, it should stay away from any implication that the
virus is a product of the Hispanophonic world (or, I guess, that
hopping rabbits are to blame). Surely global-health officials
will be more inclined to fumigate the discourse with another
odorless, colorless gas of pseudowords and digits�something in
the lifeless spirit of COVID-19. Along these lines, the
emergency-medicine physician Jeremy Faust has suggested �OPOXID-
22,� short for �orthopoxvirus disease 2022.� Even a bland name,
however, might not immunize the WHO against blowback. Boghuma
Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease doctor, has already
criticized Faust�s proposal as incorrectly implying that
monkeypox is new to 2022. Call it �IgnoredPox (IPOX)� instead,
she suggested, in light of the fact that outbreaks have been
neglected for decades.

Granted, monkeypox is not a great name for a disease that
spreads between humans, and nothing good can come of potentially
racist associations or implications of bestiality. But the WHO�s
�Best Practices,� if deployed across the board, would exclude
many�maybe most�of the medical terms in use today. Taken in
broader perspective, monkeypox isn�t even unusually off-base.
Chickenpox has little to do with chickens, for instance, and,
unlike monkeypox, it�s not a poxvirus but a herpesvirus. Maybe
in a more perfect world, we�d refer to chickenpox as �chicken
herpes�; but then again, the herpesviruses�named for the
creeping spread of lesions they may produce�are already
stigmatizing given their association with sexually transmitted
infections. Nearly all of us contract a herpesvirus during our
lives, via nonsexual spread. Just the same, I remember telling
one patient that he had a disseminated herpesvirus infection
only to watch him jump to the erroneous conclusion that his wife
must have committed adultery.

Even though monkeypox is being used to harass people right now,
bad actors who truly wish to deepen victims� shame will always
find a way to do so. Earlier this month, two gay men in
Washington, D.C., are alleged to have been berated, then beaten,
by teenagers who included monkeypox among a string of homophobic
slurs. If that particular word had been unavailable, I�ll bet
the others would have sufficed. Tone of voice and body language
can, by themselves, turn a good word bad; and there�s little
reason to think that any term for a disease, no matter how
generic it might seem, cannot be wielded for ill purposes. �The
name per se is not a major issue,� Mike Ryan, the executive
director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, said last
month. �It�s the weaponization of these names. It�s the use of
these names in the pejorative.� Indeed, HIV is no longer called
�gay-related immune deficiency,� but gay men are still
frequently ostracized over the condition. Connotation outlives
denotation. Even COVID-19�a disease name that was designed from
the very start to be as inoffensive as possible�can easily be
turned into a slur. �Covidians� and �Covidiots� abound.