was first discovered in lab primates in the late 1950s, but rodents have actually been the big transmitter of the disease to humans in the past, said de Oliveira over the phone from Brazil.
Naming viruses after countries, regions or groups of people can cause economic damage, but “we also risk that certain countries will choose not to make public a pathogen or new variant because then they get a negative connotation,” de Oliveira added. What’s more, that variant is only dubbed Omicron because, as the WHO marched through the Greek alphabet in naming COVID variants, it skipped two letters: “Nu,” because English speakers would confuse it with “new,” and “Xi,” because it’s a common last name .
Imagine if the first cases in the recent outbreak had been found in Canada, he said: “Would the Canadians be comfortable that we called them the Canadian pox virus?”
How did we survive as a species for millennia naming diseases wrong?
Wow, in 2022 how is a decision like naming an infectious disease done in such a haphazard way!
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