Skip to main content
bioRxiv
  • Home
  • About
  • Submit
  • ALERTS / RSS
Advanced Search
New Results

Naming of human diseases on the wrong side of history

View ORCID ProfileZhiwen Hu
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.01.442270
Zhiwen Hu
School of Computer and Information Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • ORCID record for Zhiwen Hu
  • For correspondence: huzhiwen@zjgsu.edu.cn
  • Abstract
  • Full Text
  • Info/History
  • Metrics
  • Data/Code
  • Preview PDF
Loading

Abstract

Background In the medical sphere, understanding naming conventions strengthen the integrity and quality of naming human diseases remains nominal rather than substantial yet. Some strongly-held but flawed names like German measles frequently appear in scientific literature.

Objective This study examines whether some stereotypes of diseases like German measles are at the cost of social impacts. As an exemplificative case, we also offer a heuristic approach to determine a pithy synonym instead of German measles.

Methods In the global online news coverage experiments, we examined the compiled global online news volumes and emotional tones on German measles, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish flu, Hong Kong flu, and Huntington’s disease in the past two years. The results demonstrate 65 multilingual textual and visual narratives via GDELT’s machine translation and neural network image recognition. In the historiographical survey, we prototypically scrutinize the lexical dynamics and pathological differentials of German measles and common synonyms by leveraging the capacity of the Google Books Ngram Corpus.

Results The results of the global online news coverage experiments show that the public informed the long-standing but flawed names like German measles with extremely negative tones in textual and visual narratives. Furthermore, the findings of the historiographical study indicate that many synonyms of German measles did not survive, while German measles has been on the wrong side of history, and rubella has taken the dominant place since 1994.

Conclusions This study first orchestrates rich metadata to unveil that the nosological evolution of German measles is on the wrong side of history. The survey strongly indicates that some stereotypes of diseases like German measles have always come at the cost of sociocultural impacts, whatever their seemingly harmless origins. To mitigate such impacts, rubella should exclusively become the common usage rather than German Measles in scientific perspective.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Ethics approval and consent to participate: Not applicable.

  • Competing interests: The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest.

  • https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/summary/summary

  • https://books.google.com/ngrams

  • Abbreviations

    COVID-19
    Coronavirus Disease 2019
    GBNC
    Google Books Ngram Corpus
    GDELT
    Global Data on Events, Location and Tone
    ICD
    International Classification of Diseases
    MERS
    Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome
    OED Online
    Oxford English Dictionary Online
    WHO
    World Health Organization
  • Copyright 
    The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
    Back to top
    PreviousNext
    Posted June 04, 2021.
    Download PDF
    Data/Code
    Email

    Thank you for your interest in spreading the word about bioRxiv.

    NOTE: Your email address is requested solely to identify you as the sender of this article.

    Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
    Naming of human diseases on the wrong side of history
    (Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from bioRxiv
    (Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from the bioRxiv website.
    CAPTCHA
    This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
    Share
    Naming of human diseases on the wrong side of history
    Zhiwen Hu
    bioRxiv 2021.05.01.442270; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.01.442270
    Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo Google logo LinkedIn logo Mendeley logo
    Citation Tools
    Naming of human diseases on the wrong side of history
    Zhiwen Hu
    bioRxiv 2021.05.01.442270; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.01.442270

    Citation Manager Formats

    • BibTeX
    • Bookends
    • EasyBib
    • EndNote (tagged)
    • EndNote 8 (xml)
    • Medlars
    • Mendeley
    • Papers
    • RefWorks Tagged
    • Ref Manager
    • RIS
    • Zotero
    • Tweet Widget
    • Facebook Like
    • Google Plus One

    Subject Area

    • Scientific Communication and Education
    Subject Areas
    All Articles
    • Animal Behavior and Cognition (3514)
    • Biochemistry (7365)
    • Bioengineering (5342)
    • Bioinformatics (20318)
    • Biophysics (10041)
    • Cancer Biology (7773)
    • Cell Biology (11348)
    • Clinical Trials (138)
    • Developmental Biology (6450)
    • Ecology (9979)
    • Epidemiology (2065)
    • Evolutionary Biology (13354)
    • Genetics (9370)
    • Genomics (12607)
    • Immunology (7724)
    • Microbiology (19087)
    • Molecular Biology (7459)
    • Neuroscience (41134)
    • Paleontology (300)
    • Pathology (1235)
    • Pharmacology and Toxicology (2142)
    • Physiology (3177)
    • Plant Biology (6878)
    • Scientific Communication and Education (1276)
    • Synthetic Biology (1900)
    • Systems Biology (5328)
    • Zoology (1091)