Interesting Words - Diseases

The WHO (World Health Organisation) has new rules for avoiding offensive names for new diseases.

(The new guidelines are aimed at removing the stigma that can be inflicted by diseases that use the names of people, places, and animals.

The new guidelines called “The Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases” would discourage names like Spanish flu, German measles, Ebola, swine flu , bird flu, Rift Valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, monkey pox, and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), and encourage the use of more neutral, generic terms, such as severe respiratory disease or novel neurologic syndrome.

Under the new guidelines, Marburg disease (named after a city in Germany) might have been called filovirus-associated haemorrhagic fever, while Ebola (named after a river) might have been filovirus-associated haemorrhagic fever.)

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