Just when you thought it was safe to go outside, the pox rolled into town. Monkeypox is a virus soon to be renamed in an effort to curb racism. In response to the polemic, the World Health Organisation will convene an urgent meeting to find a more politically correct name for the pox.
When news breaks that a pathogen is spreading across the world, the wheels of political correctness are set in motion. Within weeks of monkeypox spreading to Western states, race activists registered offence at the media using photos of black people with the virus. Others complained that associating Africa with monkeypox was stigmatising.
In May, the Foreign Press Association, Africa claimed that Western media showing black people with monkeypox was a negative stereotype that “assigns calamity to the African race”. It questioned why such photos were being used when the virus was spreading across Europe and North America, asking: “Is the media in the business of ‘preserving white purity’ through ‘black criminality or culpability?”’ No, not quite. The reason there are images from Africa for stories about monkeypox is that, until last month, outbreaks were reported mainly in African countries. As the WHO observed, monkeypox endemic countries are: Benin, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana (identified in animals only), Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan.
In spite of the history of the virus, the FPAA urged editors to censure their staff to stop them “using images of Africans, people of African descent or people living in Africa to depict outbreaks of diseases or any calamities”. It offered its services to “media houses seeking to review their editorial policies to reflect correct framing of Africa, people of African descent and people living in Africa”.
When we speak of “correct framing”, there is a certain obligation to make truth the basis of it. For instance, the source of a common image showing a black person’s arms with monkeypox is the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control. The paucity of images of white people is not due to racism, but the fact that, before May, previous cases diagnosed in non-endemic countries have been relatively rare and associated with travel to or from Africa.
A group of scientists published a joint paper earlier in June supporting the FPAA position and claiming, furthermore, that reference to the virus being African is “discriminatory and stigmatising”. They stated that the use by “mainstream media in the global north” of photos depicting African patients with lesions was an obvious manifestation of the discrimination and stigmatisation.
To date, no evidence has been provided by people claiming the depiction of actual patients with monkeypox lesions has led to race-based discrimination. Such evidence was also lacking when China accused Western leaders of racism in 2020 for referring to the novel coronavirus as the Wuhan virus. It was so-called because the viral outbreak had first been observed in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times referred to its origin in a January 22, 2020 article titled “Wuhan pneumonia a wake-up call for basic Chinese research”. Other Chinese media, including People’s Daily and Xinhua Net, referred to it as Wuhan pneumonia.
In February 2020, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced Covid-19 as the new name for the virus, stating it was important to “prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatising”.
Writing for the British Medical Journal, Luke Taylor noted that the WHO’s decision to rename monkeypox came after the FPAA expressed concerns about race in media portrayals of the virus. The WHO told the journal that, “Names should be given with the aim to minimise unnecessary negative impact on trade, travel, tourism, or animal welfare, and avoid causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional, or ethnic groups.”
The fact that monkeypox became endemic in a non-Western country does not mean that people in the developing world should be viewed as less worthy. It simply reflects the reality that pathogens are opportunistic and thrive in environmental conditions that favour them. In any country and among people of any race, poverty is often associated with outbreaks of disease because clean water, nutritious food and sanitary conditions are very difficult to maintain without money. Viruses and bacteria are equal opportunity killers.
In its June 17 update, the WHO reported that, of the cases from 14 countries where rich demographic data is available, 99 per cent of cases are in men aged 0 to 65 years. The US Centres for Disease Control is tracking multiple cases of monkeypox in several countries that do not normally report it and early data suggests that men who have sex with men comprise a high proportion of cases.
In America and Britain, health officials and advocates are rushing to publicise health warnings about monkeypox in time for Pride celebrations. On June 1, the British government reported that of 190 confirmed cases, 111 were men who have sex with men. At the time of writing, 574 cases had been confirmed in the UK.
In Europe, the pattern is similar, even where only a few cases have been confirmed. In Slovenia, for example, the first two cases of monkeypox were detected in men recently returned from the Canary Islands, a popular gay-friendly tourist destination located off the northwestern coast of Africa. The men presented with general malaise and anogenital skin lesions and were subsequently diagnosed with the milder West African virus.
Monkeypox is not the new HIV/AIDS. The type observed in Western countries is producing a relatively mild, albeit visibly uncomfortable, illness a few weeks in duration. There are far greater health risks, including STIs, in Western countries.
What we can learn from past experience is that telling the plain truth about pathogens is the best we can do to help humanity survive them. Politics should take a back seat to truth in science.
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