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Of course, because for some reason this is suddenly unacceptable but it is ok to have an Indian variant or a Brazilian variant.
by elzbardico 5y ago
Of course, because for some reason this is suddenly unacceptable but it is ok to have an Indian variant or a Brazilian variant.
- asutekku 5y agoThere's a semantic difference with "X virus" and "Y variant". "X virus" denotes the virus was caused by country X and is behind it all, whereas "Y variant" denotes it was mutated in there but is not the root cause of it all.
- nemo44x 5y agoBut yet “Havana Syndrome” is freely used everywhere.
- Seanambers 5y agoYeah, at a certain point back in 2020 it suddenly was very bad to have variants with geographic origin in the naming. Although that was how it had been done in many other cases.
- ALittleLight 5y agoI don't think that's true. West Nile Virus wasn't caused by people West of the Nile, the Spanish Flu wasn't caused by Spain, MERS is called that because it was discovered in the Middle East, not because people in the Middle East caused it, etc. The form "X virus" does not at all imply that the virus was caused by X. Then, of course, there is the very real possibility that China literally did cause the virus.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoDoubt the people in the countries who are associated with those variants appreciate your semantic parsing.
- krsdcbl 5y agoI don't think there is so much, the distinction between "caused by" and "discovered there" escapes most people in casual use Imho the reason this time it was different with terms like "China flu" is not that it's generally unacceptable to nickname an illness by it's region of first discovery, but that Trump was actively using this terminology to push an agenda
- jon-wood 5y agoThat's also considered unacceptable, and the reason variants are now assigned sequential names from the phonetic alphabet, hence "Delta Variant".
- defaultprimate 5y agoZika Ebola Lyme MERS West Nile Virus Marburg Virus Guinea Worm German Measles Ross River Fever Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever Norovirus Or for a complete list of thousands, simply look up toponymic diseases
- krallja 5y agoGerman measles is more commonly called rubella
- javagram 5y ago2015: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/discovered-disease-who-has-new-rules-avoiding-offensive-names https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/discovered-disease-w... > The World Health Organization (WHO) mostly works to reduce the physical toll of disease. But last week it turned to another kind of harm: the insult and stigma inflicted by diseases named for people, places, and animals. Among the existing monikers that its new guidelines “for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases” would discourage: Ebola, swine flu, Rift Valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and monkey pox.
- socram2k 5y agoSpanish flu...
- detaro 5y agois an excellent example of why that kind of naming is stupid, given that it likely first appeared in the US and primarily became known as "spanish" because Spain (not being at war) was actually talking about it instead of censoring reports about it.
- pajamanaut 5y agoI heard the terms "corona" and "covid" long before the term "china flu"