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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.
Ebola gets its name from a River in the Republic of Congo, despite the fact that it was not discovered in or on that river.
The Egyptian government began slaughtering pigs today as a preventative measure to stop the spread of the swine flu.... Over 300,000 pigs will be killed immediately despite no reported cases of the pandemic in the country.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Is a disease.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes