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Monkeypox has been renamed mpox in order reduce stigmatization and racism associated with the name, the World Health Organization (WHO) .

While the process of changing the name of a virus would normally take a couple of years, the process was accelerated in this case. Mpox will enter ICD-10 online within days as a synonym for monkeypox and become official in the 2023 release of ICD-11, according to a press release from the WHO.

Monkeypox will be used synonymously with mpox for 1 year to allow for transition, then be phased out.

"WHO will adopt the term mpox in its communications, and encourages others to follow these recommendations, to minimize any ongoing negative impact of the current name and from adoption of the new name," the WHO said in a press release.

The Biden administration has thrown its support behind the name change. "We welcome the change by the World Health Organization. We must do all we can to break down barriers to public health, and reducing stigma associated with disease is one critical step in our work to end mpox," HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a press release.

The HHS release noted that the name change "will aid efforts to reach the most impacted communities with a term for the disease that doesn't act to marginalize individuals from accessing the care, resources, and support they need to protect themselves and others."

Critics have argued that the name monkeypox was misleading in suggesting that the virus spread to humans from monkeys and played into racist stereotypes about Black and African people.

Monkeypox originally got its name after the virus was found in monkeys in captivity in 1958. It was then assigned to human monkeypox in 1970.

In 2015, the WHO published , which advises to name new human diseases with minimal unnecessary negative impacts on trade, travel, or animal welfare and to avoid causing offence to any cultural, social, national or regional, professional, or ethnic groups. Names of not just monkeypox, but all orthopox viruses were already being reconsidered by the , including cowpox, horsepox, and camelpox. That process will continue, the WHO noted.

The name change for monkeypox, first discussed by the WHO about 6 months ago, was decided through consultation with experts, countries, and the general public about rationale, scientific appropriateness, and particularly absence of geographical or zoological references. In addition, pronunciation, usability in different languages and the extent of the current usage were considered.

The 1-year transition period with mpox and monkeypox used synonymously will offer enough time to "mitigate the concerns raised by experts about confusion" and "time to complete the ICD update process and to update WHO publications," the WHO press release explained.

In addition, to address the ease of scientific search retrieval for researchers, the term "monkeypox" will remain a searchable term in ICD, the release said.

It's not the first time mpox has faced name changes. The naming convention for the mpox variants, called "clades," was concluded by an ad hoc committee in . The variant formerly called the Central African or Congo Basin monkeypox variant is now known as mpox Clade I, for example. Clade II, now broken into Clade IIa and Clade IIb, was formerly called the West African monkeypox clade. Both of these were changed to extinguish geographical stigma of the virus.

The former naming convention was not only contrary to current guidelines but also imprecise; the current global outbreak, specifically involving the mpox Clade IIb variant, has infected over 80,000 people in human-to-human transmission predominantly in North America and Europe.

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