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World Health Organization Has New Rules For Avoiding Offensive Names
sciencehabit writes: Last week The World Health Organization (WHO) decided to address not only the physical toll of disease but the stigma inflicted by diseases named for people, places, and animals as well. Among the existing names that its new guidelines "for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases" would discourage: Ebola, swine flu, Rift valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and monkey pox. The organization suggests researchers, health officials, and journalists should use more neutral, generic terms, such as severe respiratory disease or novel neurologic syndrome instead. “It will certainly lead to boring names and a lot of confusion,” predicts Linfa Wang, an expert on emerging infectious diseases at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong. “You should not take political correctness so far that in the end no one is able to distinguish these diseases,” says Christian Drosten, a virologist at the University of Bonn, Germany.
That and "Ebola" sounds like E. coli, causing people to confuse the two.
Intel, AMD and nVidia sure seem to know how to make up obscure and arcane names for their products, maybe the W.H.O. should ask them.
Disease #i23-DX4-R327-GTX543 has a nice ring to it.
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Worst case scenario, they have to change their name.
That is a bit much too. Nobody wants to be 'Mr. & Mrs. Alzheimer' ... and asking whole family trees to change their name is no more onerous than renaming a river.
I propose drawing on fantasy and science fiction for memorable disease names. Nazgul-flesheating-disease, Tatooine-Fever, Targaryen-herpes...
Worst case scenario, they have to change their name.
That is a bit much too. Nobody wants to be 'Mr. & Mrs. Alzheimer' .
My high school science teacher told us that the worse the disease, the greater the honor it is to have your name on it.
If the Alzheimers don't want it named after them, there are loads of researchers who would be happy to have the honor.
I am proud to say that acinetobacter baumanii has a mortality of over 50% and is resistant to every major antibiotic.
I understand avian flu wasn't the best idea since people feared birds. But what's wrong with Ebola?
Oh come on, how ridiculous is that! Next thing you know we won't be able to say "porch monkey" any more. My grandmother used to call me a porch monkey all the time when I was a kid because I'd sit on the porch and stare at my neighbours. She was just an old timer, that's the way people talked back then! Didn't mean they were racist... Although my grandmother did refer to a broken beer bottle once as a nigger knife... You know, come to think of it, my grandmother was kind of a racist.