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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: 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.