Your meaning is presumably the opposite of what you say: that since the 1918 influenza was and is commonly called "the Spanish flu", it's unreasonable to complain at certain politicians calling the current pandemic something like "the Chinese virus".
I agree with the analogy, but I think it goes the other way.
The "Spanish flu" was, so far as anyone can tell, not originally from Spain, nor was it especially bad there. It got called "the Spanish flu" because Spain was more honest than other countries about how much of it they had (there was a lot of deception going around on account of there being a war). And a hundred years later it's still being called "the Spanish flu" as if Spain were somehow to blame for it.
That's a really bad outcome.
(Obviously, its badness pales in comparison with the badness of the thing itself and the suffering and death it caused. But, as merely terminological things go, it's really bad.)
It would be much better if everyone didn't call the 1918 influenza "the Spanish flu", but obviously it's too late for that now. And it would be much better if we didn't spend the next century calling today's pandemic "the Chinese virus". The Chinese have handled it better than a lot of other countries, after all.
(It's slightly less unreasonable to call this one "the Chinese virus" than to call the 1918 one "the Spanish flu", because it does seem as if it did in fact originate in China, and an initial bad response by the Chinese authorities may be one reason why it wasn't better contained. I still don't think it's a name China should be saddled with for the next hundred years.)
Yet we call Ebola that name, because of a place. Lyme disease, same thing. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - obviously.\
This isn't some condemnation of the place, and its pretty silly to think of it that way. Doctors go to pains to have diseases named after themselves, proudly.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
Let's flip this around - is there an especially good reason to name it after a place? Is there some benefit we gain that counteracts the possibility that this will reinforce the existing stigma against Asians for the current situation? The virus has a name already - why work to change it to another name that may be more harmful if there is no good reason to?
> Yet we call Ebola that name, because of a place. Lyme disease, same thing. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - obviously.
Certainly there is a difference between calling it ebola and "the african disease". Or lyme disease being called the "american disease"? Calling it the "chinese virus", especially given the current climate fraught with geopolitical implications. Especially when there are subtle accusations by both sides blaming the other for intentionally passing the virus to them.
> This isn't some condemnation of the place, and its pretty silly to think of it that way.
Given the histories involved here, I don't think so. And toss in the trade war, it's really naive to not see the obvious here.
> Doctors go to pains to have diseases named after themselves, proudly.
Sure for recognition and to be credited for discovering the disease. Are you saying "the chinese" should be credited and honored for the virus? Should "the chinese" win the nobel prize for this discovery?
> Folks are over-thinking this.
Nothing to over-think. It's pretty obvious what the intentions are, not to mention the political motivations.
History is fraught with naming diseases, insects, etc after countries to attack those countries. Syphilis was called the french, italian, spanish, etc disease depending on politics of the nations involved. Cockroaches were called "german cockroaches" by the french, while germans called it the "french cockroach", etc depending on which nation was mad at which nation at the time. HIV was initially called a gay-related disease. But heterosexuals can get HIV. And non-chinese can get the "chinese virus" so maybe it wouldn't hurt to call it something else? What do you think?
As I posted earlier… I see President Trump's tweet from 7:19 AM - Mar 27, 2020 — after chatting to President Xi — now refers to "the CoronaVirus" and "the Virus".
It was called the Spanish flu because they were a neutral country and hence the reporters were allowed to report on the flu. It doesn't have much more than that in common with Spain.
