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WHO issues best practices for naming

beaker

ME/cfs 1986
Messages
773
Location
USA
WHO issues best practices for naming new human infectious diseases

The best practices apply to new infections, syndromes, and diseases that have never been recognized or reported before in humans, that have potential public health impact, and for which there is no disease name in common usage. They do not apply to disease names that are already established.

The best practices state that a disease name should consist of generic descriptive terms, based on the symptoms that the disease causes (e.g. respiratory disease, neurologic syndrome, watery diarrhoea) and more specific descriptive terms when robust information is available on how the disease manifests, who it affects, its severity or seasonality (e.g. progressive, juvenile, severe, winter). If the pathogen that causes the disease is known, it should be part of the disease name (e.g. coronavirus, influenza virus, salmonella).

Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever), people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic).

More in the article. But I thought important and interesting given the controversy of new proposed name, and attempts to come up with a name. We are not exactly new, but the desire to change the name may have to take this into account.

 

Denise

Senior Member
Messages
1,095
Thanks Denise. I looked to see if it was already posted, but couldn't find it.

:) You are welcome.


(I'm glad I am not the only one who has trouble sometimes seeing if a thread has already been started.)
 

Eeyore

Senior Member
Messages
595
There is a new obsession in medicine to not name anything after people anymore. Not really sure why - maybe because descriptive names are easier to remember. They've even started renaming some diseases that were named after people, although that hasn't always caught on.
 

Denise

Senior Member
Messages
1,095
There is a new obsession in medicine to not name anything after people anymore. .


I believe that at least in some cases it is because people don't want conditions/diseases named after them.
Dan Peterson and Laura Hillenbrand are among those who have indicated they have no interest in this disease being named after them.

It could be that people want to have a different legacy than being associated with the name of a disease.
 

Eeyore

Senior Member
Messages
595
I think that might be part of it - I think it's also an attempt to make things more scientific and less narcissistic. I don't really have a problem either way, I just find that right now they are a bit overzealous about it.

I can certainly see why Dr. Peterson would not want to have a disease named after him.

I would argue that if anyone should have the disease named after him/her, it would be Dr. Melvin Ramsay, who first described in in detail at the royal free outbreak. He spent his life working on it, and coined the term ME. Either that or some future person who really nails the pathophysiology down and figures it all out. Personally, I don't think I'd be pushing to get a disease named after myself (either because I had it as a patient, like Lou Gehrig, or as a doctor, such as Hashimoto's Thyroiditis).
 

SOC

Senior Member
Messages
7,849
I think that might be part of it - I think it's also an attempt to make things more scientific and less narcissistic. I don't really have a problem either way, I just find that right now they are a bit overzealous about it.
I believe that is at least part of the issue. I think another major problem they are trying to eliminate is endless fighting about who "deserves" to have a particular disease or discovery named after them. This is not just in medicine, but science-wide. There has been too much unnecessary and counter-productive bickering about something that is relatively unimportant from a scientific viewpoint.

There are far too many people involved in any scientific endeavor to give all the "honor" to one person. Who do you name the disease after, the person who first identified it? Well, who was that? There may have been several people working on it at the same time. The one who published first? So they get all the kudos because their publisher was a week quicker than another? What if multiple researchers were part of the first published research on the condition? Do we call it Smith-Jones-Yong-Kim-Khansatana-Murikana Disease?

Or do we name it after the doctor who most benefited patients over the years? Or the one who stood by patients when everyone else thought they were crazy? And which of the dozen doctors in that category should get the credit?

Or do we name it after a patient? They're the ones who are impacted the most. Do we name it after the first identified patient? The most famous patient? The patient who donated the most money to research?

We've already seen this. Ramsay's Disease. Peterson's Disease. Mirza's Disease. Hillebrand's Disease.

Frankly, I think if anyone (or anything) deserves having something this dreadful carry their name into eternity, I think the organization that quadrupled the actual misery of having this illness deserves calling out --- CDC Disease.
 

WillowJ

คภภเє ɠรค๓թєl
Messages
4,940
Location
WA, USA
I think another reason is that a person's name gives us no important information about the disease itself.

Of course that is preferable to misinformation.

But I'm sure I was told in a class that between the lack of information and some of the other things mentioned, they strongly discourage use of names or other proper nouns (and were working to change previous uses of this convention).