The world’s health authority has recently sounded the alarm on careless nomenclature, pointing out that the name of a disease can have unexpected adverse effects.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has called on scientists, national authorities and the media to follow best practices in naming new human infectious diseases to minimize unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people.
“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,” Dr Keiji Fukuda, the organisation’s assistant director-general for health security, said.
“This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected. We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods,” he said.
Diseases are often given common names by people outside of the scientific community. Once disease names are established in common usage through the Internet and social media, they are difficult to change, even if an inappropriate name is being used.
The best practices state that a disease name should consist of generic descriptive terms, based on the symptoms that the disease causes, for example respiratory disease, neurologic syndrome, watery diarrhoea. More specific descriptive terms such as progressive, juvenile, severe, winter, can be used when robust information is available on how the disease manifests, who it affects, its severity or seasonality.
If the pathogen that causes the disease is known, it should be part of the disease name – coronavirus, influenza virus and salmonella.
Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever; people’s names, as in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease or a species of animal or food for instance swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox.
Cultural, population, industry or occupational references – Legionnaires disease, for example – and terms that incite undue fear – as in unknown, fatal, epidemic – should not be used.
The final name of any new human disease is assigned by the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which is managed by WHO. ICD is used by doctors, nurses, researchers, health information managers and coders, policy makers, insurers and patient organizations around the world to classify diseases and other health problems for records and statistics.