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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Ebola is actually an example in the opposite direction you think it is.

https://www.livescience.com/48234-how-ebola-got-its-name.htm...

> But naming the virus Yambuku ran the risk of stigmatizing the village, said another scientist, Dr. Joel Breman, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This had happened before, for example, in the case of Lassa virus, which emerged in the town of Lassa in Nigeria in 1969.

> It was Karl Johnson, another researcher from the CDC, and the leader of the research team, who suggested naming the virus after a river, to tone down the emphasis on a particular place.

We were already going "place-based names kinda suck" in the 1970s.

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That said, we do still name individual species of ebola by where breakouts were discovered. Ebola Zaire & ebola Sudan were the first species identified after their respective outbreaks.

There's even ebola Reston, because of a breakout in Reston, VA. Reston infects humans (we develop antibodies), but does not cause Ebola virus disease in us.

All of these predate the policy change.

https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-has-a-name-the-deadl...

> In 2015, after a few decades of what came to seem in hindsight like culturally insensitive missteps, the World Health Organization issued a policy statement on how to name emerging infectious diseases. Part of the point was to help scientists generate names before the public does it for them. So there are rules. The names have to be generic, based on science-y things like symptoms or severity—no more places (Spanish Flu), people (Creutzfeld-Jacob disease), or animals (bird flu).

Correct, I was speaking more in the context of Ebolavirus itself. As you pointed out, Johnson suggested naming it after the river in the 70s – but every Ebola species named (the last one in the early 2010s) still had a local name attached.

No more people? That's a huge mistake. There's a long history of naming diseases after the first to characterize it. Eponymous disease names are the majority?

Ebola is a relatively local disease, since it travels by animals and direct contact, not couhing, and because it so dangerous that it kills or incapacitates before people travel too far.

Even so, it's misleading because Ebola doesn't care about geographic boundaries.

Yeah maybe a tiny village in Africa has an issue. But I imagine the entire nation of China would survive it. E.g. the German Measles haven't impacted tourism in Munich...

And to be frank, if this virus was in fact generated by the markets in Wuhan (like so many other flu viruses over the years?) then maybe they should own it. Housing mammals and birds so closely together in large numbers is a health hazard to everybody, as we're learning to our dismay. They've had 20 years to do something about this.

> And to be frank, if this virus was in fact generated by the markets in Wuhan (like so many other flu viruses over the years?) then maybe they should own it.

The US currently has the worst infection curve and the most cases, despite months to prepare. Should it be called the American virus because of our fuckups here?

(No.)

Red herring? Flu viruses are created by irresponsible livestock management, costing billions in lost work every year. Now, possibly millions of lives. All avoidable at the source, and well-know for decades.

Call them carnivore viruses?

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