Swine Flu, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Japanese encephalitis, other such names for human infectious diseases not only create negative impact on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare, but also may end up offending cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups, the World Health Organisation says and in a bid to alleviate these issues, the international organisation has proposed best practices for the naming of future human infectious diseases.
To come up with the best practices, WHO has worked with the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
WHO strongly encourage scientists, national authorities, the national and international media and other stakeholders to follow the best practices set out in this document when naming a human disease. If an inappropriate name is released or used or if a disease remains unnamed, WHO, the agency responsible for global public health events, may issue an interim name for the diseases and recommend its use, so that inappropriate names do not become established.
According to WHO, the best practices shall apply to a new disease that is an infection, syndrome, or disease of humans; has never been recognized before in humans having a potential public health impact; and where no disease name is yet established in common usage.
WHO recommends that while naming a new disease, some generic naming principles need to be followed. First is the use of generic descriptive terms as they will be most useful when available information on the disease or syndrome is not sufficiently robust, because these basic characteristics are unlikely to change as additional information become available. Examples of generic descriptive terms include respiratory disease, hepatitis, neurologic syndrome, watery diarrhoea, and enteritis.
As an when sufficiently robust information about the disease is available, the best practices call for use of specific descriptive terms including progressive, juvenile, severe, and winter.
If the causative pathogen is known, the best practices state that the name of the pathogen should be used as part of the disease name with additional descriptors e.g. novel coronavirus respiratory syndrome.
Further, names should be short and easy to pronounce e.g. H7N9, rabies, malaria, polio. Cases where a long name has to be given and subsequently shortened into an acronym, WHO says that the potential acronyms should be evaluated to ensure they also comply with these best practices.
Ultimately, the names should be as consistent as possible with guidance from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) Content Model Reference Guide.
WHO best practices specifically disallow use of geographic locations including names of cities, countries, regions, continents; people’s names; species/class of animal or food; cultural, population, industry or occupational references; and terms that incite undue fear.
