The coronavirus that emerged in China late last year is still without a permanent name.
The World Health Organization established guidelines in 2015 to help scientists name new infections.
Now, researchers at the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses are working on classifying and naming the 2019 novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 600 people (though no cases have been confirmed in New York).
The researchers have said they are close to making a final decision, but their proposal needs to clear peer review first.
Emil Lesho, the health care epidemiologist at Rochester Regional Health, said deciding what to call a new virus is a fraught business.
Before arriving in Rochester, Lesho ran a lab at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research where he researched multidrug-resistant microbes, like viruses and bacteria. Sometimes, his team found a new pathogen -- never studied before. And that pathogen needed a name.
Lesho said the process could be controversial.
“Somebody wanted it to have this name, and somebody wanted it to have that name, and somebody wanted to honor somebody else” with yet another name, he said.
Eventually, he decided, “Let’s just not go there. Just call it a number. Give it a serial number. It was a nice way to resolve a debate.”
That strategy worked well for isolating microbes in a lab, but in the case of the novel coronavirus, Lesho said, it’s not so effective. To be useful for the general public, the virus will need a pronounceable name that people can remember -- something like SARS or AIDS.
But coming up with that name won’t be easy, Lesho said. There are competing goals: The name should be short, but it should also convey a lot of information.
“You try to find a balance of being neutral, not inadvertently offensive in any way. You try to find a balance of being somewhat informative, not an unwieldy mouthful, and also one that’s compact enough that it can be on diagrams,” said Lesho.
An ideal name will help both the public who’s talking about the virus and the scientists who are studying it, Lesho said.
Here's a link to a longer piece Brett did on this topic for NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday.
