Naming of human diseases on the wrong side of history

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.