(CNN) Coronavirus variants will now be referred to by letters of the Greek alphabet instead of where they were first discovered, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday, in a bid to prevent the stigmatization of entire communities.
For example, instead of the "UK variant" (B.1.1.7), the WHO will now say "Alpha;" the "South African variant" (B.1.351) is now "Beta;" and the P.1 variant, first detected in Brazil, has been labeled "Gamma," CNN's Jacqueline Howard reports.
Throughout history, infectious diseases have been named after geographic locations where they were thought to have originated: West Nile virus, Zika and Ebola, to mention a few. But those associations can be damaging for those places, its people and, in some cases, be inaccurate. There is no universal consensus on where Spanish flu began, for example.
Last March, then-President Donald Trump referred to Covid-19 as "the Chinese virus." Many Asian Americans subsequently said they were blamed for bringing the coronavirus to the United States. In May, India's government expressed displeasure with media outlets using the term "Indian variant," for the B.1.617.2 Covid-19 strain first identified in the country (or "Delta," as it will be called under the new system).
The WHO says the Greek alphabet letters "will be easier and more practical to [be] discussed by non-scientific audiences." But there are some concerns that the system has arrived too late. The new names could make describing the variants even more complicated as there will now be three potential names: a scientific name, references based on where a strain was first identified and WHO's Greek alphabet labeling.
"There's definitely issues with stigmatization where the variants are being described and then labeling them based on that country. We know that there's already backlash in India, regarding the Indian variant and people mentioning it that way," Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told CNN. "So, I understand why it's happening. I think it's just a lot for people to think about this far down the line."
Q: How can we prevent future outbreaks of other diseases?
A: One step would be an international treaty on pandemic preparedness, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during the closing of the 74th World Health Assembly on Monday.
Tedros said the "defining characteristic of the pandemic is the lack of sharing: of data, information, pathogens, technologies and resources. These are the challenges ... we've been facing since the pandemic started, and even before."
A treaty would change that, "fostering improved sharing, trust and accountability, and provide the solid foundation on which to build other mechanisms for global health security," Tedros said.
But it could take some time for such an agreement to be reached. The first international public health treaty negotiated by the WHO, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, was negotiated for four years before it came into force in 2005.
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