Writing about monkeypox in The Spectator in May 2022, Douglas Murray repeated a formula he had put forward in 2020, explaining ‘the problem with us humans as a species’: ‘Someone always shags a monkey.’
Now an outbreak of new, improved monkeypox is upon us, and the first thought has been to avoid stigmatising monkeys. It has been renamed mpox. The Oxford English Dictionary, a vasty hoard where words can lie undisturbed for more than a century, was quick to comment: ‘Mpox was originally named monkeypox because it was first seen in laboratory monkeys. It was later identified in rodents and other small mammals, various wild primates, and humans. After a global outbreak of the disease in humans, starting in 2022, the name mpox was chosen to comply with World Health Organisation guidelines for the naming of new diseases (published in 2015), which recommend the avoidance of words that might stigmatise geographical regions, ethnic groups, species of animal, etc.’ With monkeypox, one suspects that a ‘geographical region’ is also being considered.
A parallel is green monkey disease. ‘A consignment of African green monkeys (Cercopithecus æthiops) imported from Uganda introduced Marburg virus to Germany in 1967 and led to the misleading and inappropriate term, green monkey disease,’ commented the Lancet in 1977. ‘It is now generally accepted that monkeys are not the natural reservoir of this virus.’ So it would be called Marburg disease, which was hard luck for the 77,845 innocent people of the German university town of Marburg. It was almost as though someone decided to call Covid Wuhan disease. But one day won’t the remnant who survive mpox be asked by their children: ‘Mummy, what does m stand for?’ In that way the M-word resembles the N-word.
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