The World Health Organization (WHO) advises scientists and public health officials to take care when naming new human infectious diseases because the wrong name can have adverse side-effects
Dr. Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s assistant director general health security, said in a press release,
“In recent years, several new human infectious diseases have emerged. The use of names such as ‘swine flu’ and ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome’ has had unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities or economic sectors.”
What’s in a disease name?
“Disease names matter to the people who are directly affected. Certain names provoke a backlash among particular religious or ethnic communities.”
This leads to the creation of unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. Unofficial names tend to spread online, particularly across social media networks, and ultimately cause confusion.
- Disease names such as mad cow disease, swine flu, avian flu, West Nile virus, Lyme, etc. cause panic and fear toward the specific location or species. It induces irrational fear of birds, cows or travelling to a particular place.
- Swine flu, although not transmitted by pigs, caused some countries to ban pork imports or slaughtered pigs after a 2009 outbreak, just because of the name.
- The fact that the disease Ebola is named after the river where the disease was first diagnosed has probably ensured most tourists stayed far away.
- Mad cow disease, for example, got its name in the 1980s from the ranchers who first noticed their cattle stumbling around.
- Two decades ago, Linfa Wang named a virus and the disease it causes after Hendra, a suburb of Brisbane, Australia. He still gets angry calls from residents complaining that the name has hurt property values.
- Even acronyms can cause controversy. In 2003, WHO officials coined SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) to describe a novel pneumonia spreading in Asia, partly to avoid a name like “Chinese flu.” However, SARS did not work well in Hong Kong, which is officially known as Hong Kong SAR, for special administrative region.
WHO has collaborated with the ICD, the World Organization for Animal Health, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to come up with best practices:
- Any name applied to a new disease should consist of generic descriptive terms, based on the symptoms that the disease causes, such as respiratory disease, neurologic syndrome, watery diarrhea.
- In addition to a generic description of symptoms, there should be more specific terms regarding how the disease manifests, who it affects, its severity or seasonality.
- If the pathogen responsible for the disease is known, it should be factored into the final name. For example, salmonella is caused by a group of bacteria with the same name.
- The name should not consist of geographic locations, people’s names, any species of animal or food, nor should they consist of any cultural, population, industry, or occupational references.
- The name alone should not be fear-inducing. Think of “unknown,” “fatal,” and “epidemic.”
The new practices provide an interim solution prior to the assignment of a final ICD disease name. They do not replace the existing ICD system. They simply apply to disease names for common usage and hence would not affect the work of existing international authoritative bodies responsible for scientific taxonomy and nomenclature of microorganisms.W
