A recent toot by @kakape made me think of an observation I once had, which I will try to unravel over the next few toots.
For the longest time, (relatively) newly discovered viruses and the diseases they caused were often named after geographic features of note near the first observed cases. So, you had the Ebola River, the Hantan River (but now referred to as Hantangang in tourist brochures, since it's now a popular whitewater rafting spot in Korea), the Rift Valley in Kenya, and the city of Junín in Argentina all lending their names to viral scourges of varying severity, to use a few popular examples. At an extreme, you have the country of Sudan lending its name to a particularly virulent strain of the Ebola virus.
(1/n)
#biology #medicine
... Show more...A recent toot by @kakape made me think of an observation I once had, which I will try to unravel over the next few toots.
For the longest time, (relatively) newly discovered viruses and the diseases they caused were often named after geographic features of note near the first observed cases. So, you had the Ebola River, the Hantan River (but now referred to as Hantangang in tourist brochures, since it's now a popular whitewater rafting spot in Korea), the Rift Valley in Kenya, and the city of JunΓn in Argentina all lending their names to viral scourges of varying severity, to use a few popular examples. At an extreme, you have the country of Sudan lending its name to a particularly virulent strain of the Ebola virus.
(1/n)
#biology #medicine
The contrast between the number of media requests I got when rich people on a cruise were facing a deadly, but contained outbreak versus now that some of the poorest people in the world are facing a deadly and devastating epidemic is just so so stark and it just really annoys the hell out of me.
