Let's Rename Swine Flu As "Colbert Flu" 607
Bruce Perens writes "The World Health Organization will no longer refer to Virus A(H1N1) as 'Swine Flu,' citing ethnic reactions to 'swine,' for example among middle-eastern cultures who feel that swine are unclean. Or, is it because meat packers are concerned that people might stop eating pork in fear of the virus? WHO suggests that the public select a new name for the virus. I suggest that we all start calling it The Colbert Flu, after the comedian and fake pundit who asked his audience to stuff a NASA poll so that a Space Station module would be named after him. What can we do to make the name stick?"
Re:Dear Bruce... (Score:5, Interesting)
Heh, Colbert might go for it though...The whole massively self-aggrandizing nature of his stage personality would eat it up.
Be a lot easier to just call it the "Mexico Influenza" though. That's pretty much the standard for these things.
Re:Dear Bruce... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, Colbert is generally a positive influence. His "fake punditry" is pungent social comment, with the intent of nudging the his audience to think about these issues. While being funny, which keeps them coming back. All in all, a good thing.
Good, except some people can't tell the difference [sagepub.com]
Pandemic naming system (Score:3, Interesting)
No person, country, or industry deserves to be saddled with the name of a deadly infectious disease that happens by random evolutionary chance.
We have a similar problem with random tropical storms that can eventually turn deadly, and we have in place standard, non-offensive naming system. It uses an annual system with alpha-ordered names.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone_naming [wikipedia.org]
Given the ever-growing global population and the *inevitable* concomitant increase in pandemic diseases, we will eventually need to come up with preemptive arbitrary unoffensive names like we do for storms.
Get the WHO or some robust international group to make a set of arbitrary, alpha-ordered, gender-unbiased names, and any time one reaches pandemic stage 4 (or some stage of early but serious global problem), assign the next name.
Like:
Arthur Flu
Betty Stomach Bug
Carl Flu
Denise Spotty Fever
Eric Virus
Florence Worms
etc ...
Trichinosis (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Let's not (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Let's not (Score:3, Interesting)
How could a virus come from a pig-sty? Even if in poor condition. Bacteria live for a long time in feces, virus don't.
A virus needs a live body to live body transfer, or at least a short term in a moist cool dark place.
Now I could see a transfer happening at slaughter. To kill, gut, and dismember an animal is a very intimate thing, you get covered in goo, there are aerosols of blood and other fluids. Yes, it's messy, and you're playing with sharp knives, cutting through bone and cartilage, leaving sharp edges to scrape yourself on... After all the hard work is done, you scrub and scrub, and you can't get the smell of blood off your body. It's much easier to call out a pro... But it's important to do it once or twice, you quickly learn a whole lot about anatomy.
Re:Dear Bruce... (Score:2, Interesting)
So all those people are wrong that call me "white" even though I am two parts Cherokee, one part Swedish and one part Russian?
Flying pig flu? (Score:3, Interesting)
This flu is actually two parts swine flu, one part bird flu...
So that would make it flying pig flu?