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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.
Worst case scenario, they have to change their name.
And everyone else who has that name.........
Of course, the whole problem would be solved if we could rip people out of the dark ages and realize "swine flu" doesn't mean you should kill all the swine.....and "Hodgkins' disease" doesn't mean you should kill everyone named Hodgkins. Seriously, half the world still needs to grow up.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Coruscant Geonosis can be treated with Bespin.
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I believe the triggering incident here was swine flu, where pigs (owned mainly by christians, since muslims don't eat pork) were slaughtered because of fears of swine flu
So Muslims once again are behaving like ignorant savages. And for that the rest of us should dumb down and obfuscate our language. No. They need to drag themselves out of the seventh century and grow up.
Really, what it comes down to is marketing, I'm sad to say. After the Heartbleed bug was announced, a number of people took note of the fact that it wasn't even the biggest security hole in the last year, yet it received far and away the most publicity, largely because the researchers who found it waited to announce it until after they had come up with a catchy name and logo for the bug. Serious outbreaks deserve appropriate marketing to ensure that the public responds appropriately, and giving them good names is a major part of that.
I'm reminded of hurricanes and how the public viewed them in the US prior to the introduction of the modern naming convention, where they're named in alphabetical order using common names that alternate between male and female every other year. People used to not take hurricanes seriously and would routinely refuse to evacuate, resulting in a number of avoidable deaths, but as soon as they were given human names, people began anthropomorphizing the storms and treating them like something that's out to get them, which is a desirable and helpful response for the public to have when dealing with natural disasters...such as infectious outbreaks.
If we only ever heard about the H1N1 flu subtype, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, much of the public would be unaware of the threat that each could pose (fun exercise: do you, the reader, know what each of those is?). After all, they don't know how influenza subtypes are organized or which ones are of greater concern. And "severe" and "acute" are terms they know, but not in the context of medicine, other than that the ER doctors on TV usually use the word "stat" shortly after saying them. Hell, most of them don't know what "bovine" refers to, let alone "spongiform encephalopathy". But ask folks about the common names that those ailments go by, and a good number of them will indicate some level of familiarity.
Again, we want people to react to disease outbreaks, and giving them boring names is exactly the wrong thing to do if we want people to take the outbreak seriously so that we can keep the disease from spreading. It's desirable that people will be more careful to wash their hands after touching surfaces in public. It's desirable that we'll have a culture that frowns on people who don't cover their mouths when coughing. It's desirable that people will avoid large, public gatherings if there's an outbreak in their area. And giving them a name to latch onto is a great marketing tool that we need to be using appropriately. Giving them all names that are indistinguishable from one another is a great way to confuse, alienate, and reduce the awareness of the public when it comes to these issues.
Just because people are dumb doesn't mean that we should rename everything.