New human diseases should be given socially acceptable names which do not offend people and countries or mention animals, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.<\/p>\n
[contextly_sidebar id=”G0BLpaHcmUCDU9P2xPzgkwsEGckPZraK”]It has produced advice for scientists and the media on choosing names.<\/p>\n
The WHO says Middle East Respiratory Syndrome and Spanish Flu are examples of what to avoid because they mention specific locations.<\/p>\n
Instead, names should contain generic terms that are “easy to pronounce”.<\/p>\n
The WHO said several new human infectious diseases had emerged in recent years and some had stigmatised certain cultures, regions and economies.<\/p>\n
Dr Keiji Fukuda, assistant director general for health security at the WHO, said: “This may seem like a trivial issue to come, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected.”<\/p>\n
Barrier to trade<\/strong><\/p>\n Dr Fukuda said certain disease names had created a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities.<\/p>\n They had also put up barriers to travel, commerce and trade, he added, and in some cases triggered the needless slaughtering of animals.<\/p>\n “This can have serious consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods.”<\/p>\n The WHO has listed a number of best practices for naming new diseases which have not been recognised in humans before.<\/p>\n They include using specific or generic descriptive terms if they are known, such as ‘severe’, ‘progressive’ or ‘respiratory disease’ and making names short and easily pronounceable.<\/p>\n Any acronyms for longer names should be checked, the advice adds.<\/p>\n Disease names which incite fear, include people’s names, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or refer to specific occupations, for example Legionnaires’ disease, should be avoided.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" New human diseases should be given socially acceptable names which do not offend people and countries or mention animals, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said. [contextly_sidebar id=”G0BLpaHcmUCDU9P2xPzgkwsEGckPZraK”]It has produced advice for scientists and the media on choosing names. The WHO says Middle East Respiratory Syndrome and Spanish Flu are examples of what to avoid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":114849,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-114848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-chinese"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/114849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}