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The Corona virus has no official name yet, and it could cost a person's life - Walla! health

2020-02-06T06:31:27.288Z


Although we all refer to it as the corona virus, the new virus that is threatening China and the world population is not yet official. A committee that convened two weeks ago should publish the name ...


The corona virus has no official name yet, and it could cost a person's life

Although we all refer to it as the corona virus, the new virus that is threatening China and the world population is not yet official. A committee that convened two weeks ago should publish the name it chose in the coming days, and they have quite a few restrictions and barriers to the new name

The corona virus has no official name yet, and it could cost a person's life

Photo: Reuters, edited by Tal Reznik

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It infected over 24,000 people, caused the deaths of about 500 and quarantined entire cities in China. He is perhaps the most talked about virus in the last decade, so how come he doesn't have an official name yet? True, you know him as the corona virus, but in fact it's the name of the group of viruses he belongs to.

The temporary name of what you know as the Corona virus is 2019-nCoV in general. The problem is that it is a non-catchy name that is difficult to pronounce. That's why a group of scientists are sitting behind closed doors these days to find a suitable term for the virus, and they are rumored to be announcing their decision very soon.

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So why did it take so long?

The new virus has already erupted in late 2019 in Wuhan city. To try to distinguish this specific virus from others, scientists called it the "new virus". Corona family viruses are named because they look like crown-like spikes in a microscope.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended the provisional name 2019-nCoV, which includes the year it was discovered, "n" to indicate new (new), and "CoV" to the Corona virus. But it's not exactly a catchy name. "The name it now has is not easy to use and the media and the public use other names for the virus," she told BBC Crystal Watson from the Health Safety Center at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

"The danger when you don't have an official name is that people start using terms like the 'Chinese virus', which can hurt some populations. With the widespread use of social media, informal names are catching on quickly and are hard to take down," she says.

The most common virus in the world today. Corona family virus (imaging: shutterstock)

Corona virus (Photo: ShutterStock)

The urgent task of naming the virus's official name is the responsibility of the International Commission on Viral Taxonomy (ICTV). Previous outbreaks of viruses worldwide are warning signs for the commission. For example, the H1N1 virus in 2009 was called "swine flu". This led Egypt to slaughter all the pigs in its territory, even though the disease was spread by people, not pigs.

"Names of certain diseases cause conflicts"

Formal names can also be problematic. The World Health Organization criticized the name Mers (or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) in 2015. "We have seen that certain diseases cause clashes against certain religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, prevent trade and trade, and cause unnecessary slaughter of animals" , The statement said.

As a result, the World Health Organization issued guidelines stating that the name for the new corona virus should not include geographic locations, people's names, animal or food type names, references to a particular culture or industry and should be brief and descriptive.

"But in order for the name to be captured, it has to roll the tongue a little faster than the other names out there," explained Benjamin Neumann, a professor of virology, who along with ten other people, sits in the ICTV research group that debated the new name. The team began discussing the name two weeks ago and took two days to quarantine one. They are now submitting the name to a scientific journal for publication and hope to announce it within days.

Corona virus map:

Source: walla

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