Why Don’t We Name Diseases After Places
All legitimate health organizations and policymakers (among them WHO and CDC) refer to coronavirus disease by the common name COVID-19. But some people insist that we should call it a “Chinese” virus or otherwise tie its name to a place. This is bullshit, and here’s why.
Many diseases in the past have been named after a place, they originated, and this turned out to be a bad idea for many reasons. First, it is often inaccurate. The 1918 influenza pandemic was nicknamed the “Spanish flu” in many countries, not because it began in Spain, but because governments did not want it to be known that they had survived an outbreak during the war. Spanish newspapers were not censored, so they were the first to report this in detail. In fact, the virus originated elsewhere , possibly in Kansas. Thus, a more accurate geographic name could have been “American Flu” or “Kansas Flu”.
But no one wants their home country to be infamous for the source of the disease, accurate or not. How would you feel if you lived near the Ebola River or Zika Forest? Linking the disease to the site can also interfere with proper outbreak management. When the plague broke out in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1900 , anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia contributed to discrimination, stigmatization, and erroneous health policies.
Anti-Chinese sentiment is also linked to the coronavirus . Focusing on who is the carrier of the disease will never be as effective as focusing on how to properly contain it. The virus doesn’t care where you are from. Anyone can get it.
For all of these reasons, the World Health Organization issued guidelines a few years ago for naming diseases so that they accurately describe them without stigmatizing people or places or causing unnecessary fear. It is now assumed that diseases will be named according to their symptoms, characteristics and the cause of the disease, if known. COVID-19, short for coronavirus disease discovered in 2019, is a fitting name. Here’s what they don’t recommend:
Terms to avoid in disease names include geographic location (such as Middle East respiratory syndrome, Spanish flu, Rift Valley fever), people’s names (such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), animal or food species ( e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkeypox), references to a culture, population, industry or profession (e.g. legionnaires), and terms that cause excessive fear (e.g. unknown, death, epidemic).
So yes, diseases were called that in the past, but the public health community has learned from its mistakes and we don’t do it anymore .
Everyone who today, in 2020, argues about the geographical name of the disease, is either naive about this story (send them this article!), Or is trying to deliberately incite xenophobic sentiments. World leaders are now blaming each other for the virus, which is silly. It’s just a virus. So let’s take it seriously and call it by its real name.