When I woke up this morning I was reflecting upon the announcement by the World Health Organization about the outbreak of “monkeypox”. Like HIV/AIDS and Ebola, the infectious disease is once again being attributed to African countries, now labeled as “ENDEMIC COUNTRIES”.

Just consider this:

From Center for Disease Control (CDC)

“Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is defined as illness caused by a novel coronavirus called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2; formerly called 2019-nCoV), which was first identified amid an outbreak of respiratory illness cases in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China.”

No one labeled China as an “endemic” country. So why does “endemic” and “non-endemic” labels being applied to some African countries?

“Endemic” in English language implies: indigenous to, original to, natural to, etc, you get the meaning.

The stench of RACISM IN MEDICINE is inescapable here. If you have credible evidence to attribute the origin of “monkeypox” to some African countries, simply focus your interventions on those countries without the additional baggage of introducing the “mark of the beast”, or the “original sin” of Biblical stories!

We know that in a number of African countries labeled as “endemic”–Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, several communities eat monkey and baboon meat. These “meats” are referred to as “bush meat”. Could the origin of “monkeypox” be traced to handling and consumption of such “meats”?

The Search For the Original Sin

At the height of the HIV/AIDS, monkeys that were infected were said to be the disease vectors (transmission mechanisms) that became the “bridge” to human infections with the deadly disease. This is the same logic that is being applied to “monkeypox”.

What the negative labels do is to complicate public health disease interventions by rendering millions of people as “suspects” in the infection of the “world at large”–Europe, in particular, where people from “endemic countries” will be subjected to intense scrutiny. Beyond what they are carrying in their luggage, WHAT ARE THEY CARRYING IN THEIR BODIES?