from the political-correctness-gone-more-rediculous dept.
From ScienceMag.org:
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. Instead, WHO says researchers, health officials, and journalists should use more neutral, generic terms, such as severe respiratory disease or novel neurologic syndrome.
Many scientists agree that disease names can be problematic, but they aren't sure the new rulebook is necessarily an improvement. "It will certainly lead to boring names and a lot of confusion," predicts Linfa Wang, an expert on emerging infectious diseases at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong. "You should not take political correctness so far that in the end no one is able to distinguish these diseases," says Christian Drosten, a virologist at the University of Bonn, Germany.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @03:43PM
I'm sorry, ma'am, the test results came back positive.
You have "Fuck-the-WHO-itis".
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 12 2015, @04:36PM
And, Mrs. Johnson, your results are back, but we can't identify the disease because WHO hasn't agreed to a name yet.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 2) by deadstick on Saturday December 12 2015, @03:45PM
Wasn't that long ago that leprosy was changed to Hansen's Disease...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @03:48PM
Hansen's Disease? I thought that was an incontrollable urge to tell people to take a seat, right over there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @08:33AM
Damn that's sad. I'd wondered what happened to that band. Mmm bop...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @03:48PM
that generates unique, politically correct, WHO names:
https://www.guidgenerator.com/online-guid-generator.aspx [guidgenerator.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 12 2015, @03:52PM
Of course, the H1-N4794a0f9-9df3-4617-a80f-055edcae9abc virus!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @07:25PM
They will just use decimal:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @09:00PM
For the best luck, please omit "4" from the name.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @04:51PM
Or should that be Donald Warm but Foul Smelling Emission of Air from the Anus?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 12 2015, @05:09PM
You fool - the more you dis The Donald, the more popular he gets. STFU unless you're on his side. If you brag on him, he'll probably lose popularity. I'm pretty much amused at the whole circus, but people can't live on bread and circus forever.
http://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828086/donald-trump-media [vox.com]
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459207587/surprised-about-donald-trumps-popularity-you-shouldnt-be [npr.org]
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @05:31PM
Unelectable! [telegraph.co.uk]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @05:49PM
Daily reminder that you can't stump the Trump [youtube.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @05:41PM
I'm sick and tired of this politically correct bullshit. It's turning people into mindless, nutless, limp wristed, telletubbied pansies. Grow some balls and say what it is. This is why I'm voting for Trump. He's not afraid of hurting someones feelings like the rest of the pansy limpwrists in DC.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @10:28PM
Trump just told Iowa farmers he's 100 percent in favor of ethanol subsidies, unlike Ted Cruz. That's going to help taxpayers across the country, right?
Nope, sorry, only those in Iowa, who hold the first event in primary season. Everyone else pays higher taxes.
When Trump panders: that's because he's a "smart businessman" who is a "master of the art of the deal".
When anyone else panders: see, that's exactly the kind of clubby behavior in Washington we need to get rid of!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:09PM
>It's turning people into mindless, nutless, limp wristed, telletubbied pansies.
I expect nothing else from the ones in charge. Everything the ones in charge do is trying to secure their position in direct and indirect ways.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @06:03PM
If a corporation releases a contaminant and the contaminant harms anyone the disease caused by said contaminant should be named after the corporation responsible.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by redneckmother on Saturday December 12 2015, @06:39PM
Excellent idea, but then we'd have to deal with "Dow Syndrome #22000", "Union Carbide Syndrome #202794", ad infinatum. I fear the lists would become extremely long, and lead to the same objections re: "distinguishable" raised in TFA.
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @06:45PM
Well, I suppose it's time to defund the WHO. They've been compromised by fucking SJWs who care more about offense than spending time combating disease and promoting world health.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 12 2015, @07:37PM
Do SJW's even fuck? It's up in the air whether they are lizard people, zombies, or part of the borg.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @08:22PM
Big pharma comes up with all kinds of in-offensive but techno-seductive, pseudo-sciencey names for their drugs. We should just follow their lead and do the same for diseases. Big pharma pays a shit-ton to marketing companies to invent those names, but I bet 90% of it could be done with a computer program, especially since disease names don't need to be bland enough to avoid scaring people off.
Input some basic info about the disease into the name generator, let it come up with a couple of hundred candidate names, check that they don't mean anything in any major languages (probably can automate that too), narrow it down to 10 or so and then let all the people working on the disease, even the janitorial staff, have a vote.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday December 12 2015, @08:31PM
the problem here isn't "oww, you offended my sensibilities!" it's the fucking morons that hear "swine flu" determine that they must slaughter all the pigs in their country. the problem is ignorance and unless there is a pathogen that only kills people too ignorant to be embarrassed, we need to make name for contagions boring.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @09:39PM
The term "swine flu" is descriptive, not whimsical: pigs carry influenza, and can pass it to humans. Avoiding contact with them—and with aquatic birds—is a reasonable way to avoid influenza. Slaughtering pigs might not, in the short term, be a way to avoid them, but in the long term it could be reasonable.
—https://web.archive.org/web/20131106113531/http://www.vetscite.org/publish/articles/000041/print.html [archive.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday December 13 2015, @01:16AM
It's even more descriptive than that. Swine flu was derived from a particular strain of influenza that was carried by pigs. (Not, admittedly, the only strain.) Just like bird flu was named after a particular strain of influenza that was carried by birds, and was occasionally jumping to people.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Sunday December 13 2015, @12:06AM
The reason that we're supposed to refer to that outbreak as the H1N1 flu rather than the swine flu was because Muslims and Jews would never admit to being exposed to it because they think it implies that they're eating pork or coming into contact with pigs.
It's backwards minded bullshit that is being pandered to for practical reasons. The long term solution really shouldn't be to pander to ignorance, that's how civilizations wind up in dark ages.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:38AM
The reason that we're supposed to refer to that outbreak as the H1N1 flu rather than the swine flu was because Muslims and Jews would never admit to being exposed to it because they think it implies that they're eating pork or coming into contact with pigs.
You can't just drop that claim and walk away. One israeli minister had a little fit about the name, [telegraph.co.uk] and wanted to call it the "mexican flu" but no one went along with him, that's all.
But egypt slaughtered [independent.co.uk] nearly all of their pigs because of the name and 27 nations blocked pork imports [go.com] from the US, causing more than $1B in lost business.
So the evidence is you are wrong and Gravis is right. It's all about the dollars.
(Score: 3, Funny) by frojack on Saturday December 12 2015, @08:31PM
You've probably got a very good reason to be worried about how people name things.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @09:15PM
How's that?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday December 12 2015, @08:39PM
How about naming the disease after the doctor that discovered it, like Thripshaw's Disease [youtube.com]?
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @09:44PM
In the summary, one of the examples of names the WHO dislikes is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. They discourage the use of people's names.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday December 12 2015, @09:52PM
Why?
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @09:57PM
Who cares
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday December 12 2015, @08:42PM
So is Ebola a place, a human name or an animal? I seriously wouldn't know.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Saturday December 12 2015, @09:50PM
It's a place, the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, close to where the disease was first identified in 1976:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_River [wikipedia.org]
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mendax on Saturday December 12 2015, @10:02PM
When I was married, we would tell my stepson that he needed to pull back the skin on his uncircumcised willy and keep it clean in order to avoid Rotted Penis Syndrome. Now I like that name. No doubt it is far more descriptive and poetic than whatever the medical term actually is if it an infection became bad enough.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Saturday December 12 2015, @11:55PM
Clearly the real solution would have been to forcibly mutilate his genitals.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Sunday December 13 2015, @05:55AM
Not a good option as I am sure you can understand. It was done to me before I could make a decision for myself. I'd never want to do that to a child, even one of his age, who could decide for himself.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @01:15PM
This happened so often that my home state has banned the removal of foreskin from babies.
Decades after my wang was permanently damaged by a well meaning doctor.
I get to hate the jewish faith. Before any arguements are presented you get to hear how this has affected my sex life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:17AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @08:40AM
I get Lasagna Fever every once in a while. Chronic Baked Spaghetti Leftovers is a more common strain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2015, @02:04PM
Balanitis xerotica, IIRC.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday December 13 2015, @12:54AM
I once gave a buddy a home accupuncture kit I picked up in China. Had a lot of fun translating the manual. My favorite ailment: "Weeping Anus."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Sunday December 13 2015, @03:55AM
And where, precisely, do you stick needles for "Weeping Anus"? Or is finding that out going to make me cringe?
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 14 2015, @09:19PM
Oh, it was 20 years ago and I couldn't say any more. But the idea that something called "Weeping Anus" was self-treatable made me laugh and laugh at the time. Next to the name of the ailment the manual should have said, "Uh, dude. Go see the doctor about that. Really."
Washington DC delenda est.