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.

Comments

Not for animals or locations

[gurps_npc]

Makes sense. You name a disease for a location and nobody wants to go there.

You name a disease for a creature and it's open season on that creature - and the destroys any business that uses them.

These things happen even if the location/creature is only tangentially related to the disease.

But there is no reason not to name a disease after the first patient/doctor that gets/discovers it.

Worst case scenario, they have to change their name.

Re:Not for animals or locations

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:Not for animals or locations

[vux984]

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...

Re:Not for animals or locations

[phantomfive]

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. Quote:

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.

Re:Not for animals or locations

[Whiteox]

Way back when swine flu was rampant, the only pig in Afghanistan was quarantined. Evidently, the Afghans kept one as a curiosity in a zoo.
http://www.reuters.com/article...

Re:Not for animals or locations

[nbauman]

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.

Re:Not for animals or locations

[Lehk228]

no we should not change how the whole world works on account of a bunch of barbaric muslims.

Re:Not for animals or locations

[Anubis IV]

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.

Re:Not for animals or locations

[ganjadude]

so let me get this straight...

Because egypt is stupid enough to do this....we have to change the rules????

really????

REALLY??!?!??

Re:Ebola

[netsavior]

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.

Chicken or egg syndrome

[Culture20]

Will this help, or will "acute respiratory syndrome" become the new offensive term?

How about asking tech companies?

[ArcadeMan]

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.

WHO thought this was a good idea?

[penguinoid]

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

WHO thought this was a good idea? It's all fun and games until someone confuses two different severe respiratory diseases, or a novel neurologic syndrome for an older neurologic syndrome.

Here's an idea

[ArcadeMan]

Don't name anything with the word Belg... oh, I almost said it right there.

This word has been known to start intergalactic wars.

Re:they'll all sound like Star Wars Planets

[Irate Engineer]

Coruscant Geonosis can be treated with Bespin.

Re:they'll all sound like Star Wars Planets

[MrL0G1C]

You should be thankful WHO renamed that, it was dogshag flu before.

Political correctness

[Vinegar Joe]

Is a disease.

Dumb it down for the Muslims? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Easy fix

[c]

Name diseases after serial/mass killers and cults, with some consideration given to their body counts.

Re:Depends on your goals

[sexconker]

The goal isn't political correctness, it's ambiguity and confusion.
The WHO doesn't get enough action screaming about code red level 5 pandemics like swine flu, and doesn't have enough wiggle room to downplay massive fuckups.
So they want to change how diseases are named and classified so that they can further "control the message".
It's like when an software developer decides to rebrand itself as a cloud-based, web-scale, IT solutions vendor. The names mean nothing, you have no idea what you're getting or what it does, and it costs more.
Basically, the WHO wants disease as a service.

Re:Ebola and E. coli

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the confusion with e-cola a pepsi knock off that causes you to bleed from your eyes

Linfa Wang...

[HockeyPuck]

âoeIt will certainly lead to boring names and a lot of confusion,â predicts Linfa Wang, an expert on emerging infectious diseases at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong.

Now that sounds like a bad disease.... I'd hate to tell my wife that I've been diagnosed with a Linfa Wang...

Very Rude

[pubwvj]

This is very rude. Diseases should be name after the molecular weight numbers of the causal agents.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Magoo" said the doctor, "but you've come down with 1291-12-121-124132-1212-121-9342-12. If you have any questions just Wiki that for details."

Re:Dumb it down for the Muslims? Really?

[I'm New Around Here]

Do you have contempt for Charlie Hebdo as well?

Re:Ebola and E. coli

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because people are dumb doesn't mean that we should rename everything.

Re:Ebola

[arglebargle_xiv]

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.

Re:Dumb it down for the Muslims? Really?

[ganjadude]

stop victim blaming. when the right does it, its a problem. when the left does it....crickets?

Re:Ebola and E. coli

[davester666]

No, that's regular pepsi.