Explained: Does the WHO name diseases after countries?

The current naming convention was introduced in 2015 and advises against names involving locations, people or animals

The Indian government used a technical point in the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) handbook for naming new diseases on Wednesday when it opposed the media’s use of the phrase “Indian variant” to refer to the B.1.617 Covid-19 variant, first identified in the country.

While the scientific name given to the mutated variant doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily, WHO has made it a point to eschew naming diseases after geographic locations, people’s names, animals or food, or with references to cultures, populations, industries or occupations. This is also why the WHO sticks to the official SARS-CoV-2 or Covid-19 virus while talking about the ongoing pandemic, instead of the informal “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese virus”.

However, this change in taxonomic guidelines came into effect only in 2015, before which even the WHO used more common names while referring to diseases. Even today, diseases identified before the shift in procedure retain their common names on the WHO website.

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Two recent popular examples would be the Zika virus, a disease with similar symptoms as dengue fever first isolated in Uganda's Ziika forest; and Ebola, a deadly virus likely named arbitrarily after a river in Africa. Both these viruses were known widely by their popular names before the new WHO guidelines came into being.

A distant relative of the SARS-CoV-2 causes the illness known as the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) or “camel flu” and is listed on WHO’s website with a picture of camels, indicating the transmission of the disease from bats to camels and then to humans. Though the disease had been identified in 2012, the website has not been updated to reflect the new guidelines.

The WHO has probably adopted many of the names of diseases in use for centuries because it would be difficult and cumbersome to ensure all such disease names are wiped out in favour of harder-to-remember, location-neutral names. So, the WHO continues to list Japanese encephalitis, West Nile virus and the tick-borne Lyme disease by their common names.

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However, naming diseases after geographical locations or animal names can be grossly misleading at times and lead to many unintended consequences. The last deadly pandemic that spread across the globe, the 1918 Spanish Flu, for example, has inconclusive origins but first appeared far from the vineyards of Spain in France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

The warring nations chose to choke reporting on the outbreak to maintain morale during World War I. However, neutral Spain allowed its newspapers to freely report on the disease, creating the impression that Spain was especially hard-hit and thus binding its name to the nation throughout history.

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The other fear is that naming diseases after geographies or populations foments social stigmatisation, which ultimately spurred the WHO into formulating the new naming conventions. The 2014 Ebola outbreak resulted in African immigrants in the United States reportedly being turned away from jobs and stores. The current pandemic has seen racial violence and stigmatisation of Asia Americans and Chinese-origin people around the world.

Naming diseases, viruses and variants may be secondary to the health-related devastation they cause, but it continues to be a prickly issue for many, given the wide-ranging social, racial and historical effects it can have.