WHO Warns: Careful With Names of Diseases

WHO – Names of Diseases

The World Health Organization has now focused on new opponent which is names of diseases. The WHO has instructed those who name the diseases such as the scientist, national authorities, as well as news media outlets should be careful in minimizing unwanted negative effects on economies, nations and people.

Dr Keiji Fukuda, WHO executive, has explained on the organizations’ website that `they had seen certain disease names provoked a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, created unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade and triggered needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods’. The instructions read like introduction on `What Not to Name Your Diseases’.

The website states that `Terms that should be avoided in disease name include geographic location, people’s name, species of animal or food, cultural, population, industry or occupational references and terms that incite undue fear’ WHO does not intent to change the diseases that have already been named, though for all the new one that may come up, the international panjandrum recommend –

• That the name of the disease should be generic, with description of symptoms like `respiratory disease, neurologic syndrome, watery diarrhoea’
• Information should be included on `how the disease exhibits, who get affected, its severity or seasonality.
• Cause of the disease, if known, for instance, a virus, should be part of the name.

The desire to discover is coordinated by the privilege of selecting a name for what is discovered. A Tennessee native spangled snail darter with orange, blue and green scales has been named Ethostoma Obama which is two-inch. Researchers take pride when the thing discovered is named after them and we have several cases of these examples such as a new tarantula species in the Brazilian jungle who had discovered it, had named it after John Lennon who also had an extinct ocean species as well as a wasp named after him.

The Chicago Bulls three-peat, in 1993 had inspired a Chicago infectious disease doctor to name some new strain of salmonella bacteria after Michael Jordon. Professor of paediatric infectious diseases at North-western University Feinberg School of Medicine, Dr Stanford Shulman, informed that `he had a once in a life time opportunity to name something and so why not honour the greatest basketball player in history’. He chose the name `Salmonella mjordan’.

Names of Honour – Diverse Pantheon of Celebrities 

Likewise, astronomers who had discovered a comet had their names on it, up to 3, separated by hyphens, like the historic landing of a craft on the streaking comet – Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. The comet was also known by the crushingly mundane Comet 67P.

Communication to NASA was – If you want to stir interest in more comet landings, stick with names and not the numbers. WHO cannot be blamed for trying to scrub down the names of diseases in order to protect the innocent and crush the prejudice. On the Earth, a parasitic wasp was named after Lady Gaga while other insects, fish, plants together with other creatures carried names of honour of diverse pantheon of celebrities.