World Health Organization – Advising scientists on giving appropriate names to diseases, World Health Organization (WHO) said that these should not hurt sentiments of any person or nation.
The organization advises scientists to specifically refrain from naming diseases after animals or places, and choose names that do not involve difficult pronunciations.
WHO’s assistant director general for health security, Dr Keiji Fukuda, stated that this may seem a very trivial issue, but names of diseases mattered to those affected by it.
Recent diseases like Swine Flu, Mad Cow, and Monkey Pox are all based on animal names while Ebola, and West Nile Virus, are named after regions and this would not be acceptable anymore.
WHO has issued this advice as it feels that these controversial names have faced flake from cultural communities and thus asked scientists to practice caution while choosing disease names.
While choosing the names for latest infections and diseases, scientists can take symptoms, seasons, year or month of an infection and prefer generic terms.
The diseases that have already been named on animals, places or on individual’s need not be changed, but they need to be taken as examples of names that need to be avoided.
The wrong names have also led to many misunderstanding like at the time of the swine flu outbreak, everyone though that pigs were the main cause and many of these animals were slaughtered unduly.
Another example is the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) that targeted a particular territory, while that was just one of the places from where the virus was first reported.
Olivia Lawe Davies, a WHO spokeswoman, said that this was the first time that the health organization had issued an advice on what to do and what not to do.
The recommendation was based on discussions with organizations like the International Classification of Diseases that are involved in choosing the final names of diseases.
Health Experts Welcome Move
Medical experts welcomed the new recommendations by WHO and said that this move would help in defying stigmas and wrong assumptions on part of public. This would also help in overcoming social and cultural barriers that these wrong names create among the society.