Seeing as we’re renaming every damn thing — women to womyn, Latino to Latinx, his/her to xis/xir, Wuhan virus to Corona virus, and of course homosexual to gay, I think we took a hard look at this monkeypox thing, and courtesy of Insty, I think I’ve come up with the (data- / reality-based) proper name.
First, the data:
All patients identified as men who have sex with men and there was a median age of 41. 90% of the patients who responded to the questions on sexual activity (47/52) reported at least one new sexual partner during the three weeks prior to symptoms, and almost all (49/52) reported inconsistent condom use in this same time period. Over half of the patients (29/52) had more than five sexual partners in the 12 weeks prior to their monkeypox diagnosis.” [my emphasis]
So, ladies and gentlemen, as monkeypox has in fact got pretty much nothing to do with monkeys, herewith its new name:
HOMOPOX
Please adjust your grammar / spelling correction systems accordingly.
I like it. Remind people of where it comes from.
You might or might not remember this, but AIDS was originally supposed to be called CAIDS – for Community Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. This was, of course, pushed back against big-time by the faggot lobby, because they were scared of being “stigmatized.” Of course, the best thing that would have happened was to “stigmatize” them and let people know exactly where this disease was coming from and concentrated.
Instead, blood banks were prohibited from refusing blood based on sexual preference, which allowed infected blood to get into the blood supply (I actually had a friend who died this way when he was 20). They fought against closing the bathhouses, even though they were the breeding place for AIDS. And the result is that AIDS became a plague that affected everyone.
They are determined to do the same with the Homopox. How about all that “pride?”
“Fagbane” works for me.
.
That grossly exaggerates how likely anyone is to die from this – assuming they weren’t immunocompromised or otherwise hovering at death’s door before catching it. The (nonexisting) pandemic disease that terrifies the experts would be one as transmissible between humans as influenza and as deadly as AIDS – or as hemorrhagic fever if the disease’s progress was slowed to allow more time for transmission. This virus is the opposite: nearly as difficult to transmit human-human as AIDS and about as deadly as a medium-to-mild strain of influenza.
A note about other plague threats: Against modern medicine (even going back to the late 19th Century after germ theory, antisepsis, and smallpox vaccination became accepted), the worst plagues have all been influenza – extremely transmissible, a long enough incubation and mild enough early symptoms that victims are often out spreading it, and for some strains up to 10% death rates in the most vulnerable groups. The 1918 flu was the worst, because somehow healthy young adults were a highly vulnerable group. Smallpox killed over 10% of each generation for centuries, but vaccination has made it extinct in the wild. Bubonic plague was once terrible and still pops up in small numbers every year, but the transmission through two animal vectors slows the spread so authorities have some time to figure out what they are doing, and it’s easily treated with antibiotics now. Cholera used to be deadly, but now we know how to treat it with highly accelerated hydration to make up for the diarrhea. Tuberculosis was a slow but dangerous plague up to about 1950; it’s still difficult to treat because it was resistant to most antibiotics even when they were first invented, but the 19th century conditions that allowed it to spread so widely have been corrected (many people cramped in tiny apartments, no accurate diagnosis until it had been developing for years).