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Comment by tomatowurst | Hacker News Reader

What is really curious is this:

    The name monkeypox originates from the initial discovery of the virus in monkeys in a Danish laboratory in 1958. The first human case was identified in a child in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1970

Are there known interactions with locals and monkeys? Are they consumed?

edit: so there is consumption

    monkey meat is common in bush meat stalls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central Africa in general, with red-tailed and crowned guenons, baboons and agile mangabeys being the most common

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These kind of posts is exactly why the WHO naming scheme for viruses discourages naming viruses after animals, places, people or landmarks. Best case it can cause a misunderstanding, worst case lead to people to actively arrive at wrong conclusion.

Our of curiosity, what is a name that wouldn’t rapidly become lost in a morass of similar names?

How about Orthopox Virus Disease 2022 - ORVID-22 for short. We really risk alienating the corvids though - Carl Bergstrom wouldn't like it

Yep. The main case cluster in Portugal has been traced back to a sauna in Lisbon, and already people are reverting to harmful 80s/hiv era jokes like ‘the homosexuals are f**ing monkeys’.

It's like when COVID strains were called things like "the UK variant" - it conveys no meaning about true origin.

Monkeys can get monkeypox, which means they're not the reservoir animal.

So presuming human-monkey is how the jump happened is starting off down the wrong path.

> Monkeys can get monkeypox, which means they're not the reservoir animal.

I agree with the rest of your comment, but is this part actually true? I would think an animal could serve as a reservoir as long as the disease isn't deadly. But I don't know and I'm happy to be corrected if wrong.

The short version is no: if you get symptoms and recover, then the immune system has cleared it, so you can't be a carrier.

The obvious counter-example is herpes - where you periodically get symptoms and become infectious, but otherwise are not.

In the case of monkeypox though, as far as is currently known they are not major carriers of the disease - the name is just the animal it was first isolated in, since numerous other animals can be infected. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeypox#Reservoir

Thanks for the explanation, I hadn't considered the immune system clearing it.

> The short version is no: if you get symptoms and recover, then the immune system has cleared it, so you can't be a carrier.

That's not necessarily true. Many viruses are only pushed into dormancy by the immune system, and can come back and give you symptoms years later, at which point they can spread to other people. For example: Chickenpox, herpes, hiv.

Humans don’t get it from monkeys - we get it from other mammals such as rodents. Monkeys are just the first species in which the disease was noticed and identified.

There was an imported case in Singapore a few years ago.

" The patient reported that prior to his arrival in Singapore, he had attended a wedding in Nigeria, where he may have consumed bush meat, which could be a source of transmission of monkeypox virus."

https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/confirmed-imp...

This is just nonsense.

Bush meat is a racist term concocted by European researchers.

"Bush meat" is simply meat obtained by trapping or hunting, as opposed to farming.

When Europeans or Americans hunt boar, ducks, wild pigs, dear etc is it called "bush meat"?

And if he may have consumed bush meat, was the bush meat raw or cooked?

Did he handle the raw meat himself?

Was there an outbreak among the guests at the wedding?

Are weddings the only place bush meat is available in Nigeria?

The kind of idiotic speculation Europeans engage in when it comes to Africa is totally of the chain.

They make all kinds of outlandish claims knowing that they don't have to justify them because in Africa anything goes.

The guy caught monkey pox period. No need to add any outlandish speculations to it.

It must be really tiring for people who feel the need to spend their entire life policing the written and spoken words of others for signs of 'rayyy-cism' where none was intended.

I bet you also get outraged if someone refers to a 'blackboard' instead of a 'chalkboard'.

The bush meat angle is total nonsense.

Did he claim to catch the animal live or handle the raw meat before it was cooked?

It is only in that case where the "bush" meat angle makes sense.

Nigerian national in Singapore with monkeypox.

In this instance it's African and Asian speculation.

Your bias is showing.

There is no bias here.

Any infection from meat would come from uncooked meat, or handling the infected meat before it was cooked as cooking would kill any germs in it.

Is there some reason to believe that the meat he ate was uncooked?

He said he "may" have eaten some "bush" meat, he didn't say he handled the uncooked meat or animal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat

> When Europeans or Americans hunt boar, ducks, wild pigs, dear etc is it called "bush meat"?

It'd be called "game meat" or "wild meat". "The bush" is a synonymous term for the wild, and has neutral connotations.

> Bush meat is a racist term concocted by European researchers.

This paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7122066/ would suggest that it was just a neutral translation of what people in Cameroon were calling it. Likely just "meat from the wild", which the English would have neutrally called "meat from the bush".

But why is the term "bush" used as though the means of obtaining it is different from what white people call game?

Why isn't the appropriate translation used?

The simple fact is it is a culturally loaded term suggesting that it is different and "unclean" in some way.

It is no different from the term "wet market" used in China to describe live animals or freshly killed meat.

Are the wholesale markets for fresh fish and fresh meat in Europe called wet markets?

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