A model of COVID-19.Photo: Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty
The World Health Organization has implemented a new system toname variants of COVID-19that use Greek letters instead of country names to avoid stigmatizing the regions.
The new system gives the strains “non-stigmatizing labels,” WHO said in a statement, using letters from the Greek alphabet. The B.1.1.7 strain will now be called Alpha, B.1.351 is renamed Beta and the B.1.617.2 variant is Delta. If the 24 letters in the Greek alphabet have been used up, WHO will move to a new naming system.
After theDelta strain was identified and moved quickly through India, the country’s government asked social media platforms to remove content that called it the “India variant” out of concern that the name would lead to stigmatization.
WHO was concerned that under the old system, countries would not want to report new strains because it would be branded with their nation’s name. The Greek letters will hopefully avoid that issue and make them easier for people to refer to, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s lead COVID-19 epidemiologist,told Stat News.
“We’re not saying replace B.1.1.7, but really just to try to help some of the dialogue with the average person,” Van Kerkhove explained. “So that in public discourse, we could discuss some of these variants in more easy-to-use language.”
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This has long been a concern for WHO, and came up during past epidemics,theWashington Postreported.
“This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected,” Keiji Fukuda, a top WHO official at the time,said in 2015.
“We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals,” he continued. “This can have serious consequences for peoples' lives and livelihoods.”
source: people.com
