{"id":35854,"date":"2021-06-01T15:26:02","date_gmt":"2021-06-01T22:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=35854"},"modified":"2021-06-01T15:26:02","modified_gmt":"2021-06-01T22:26:02","slug":"who-revising-covid-19-variant-naming-to-avoid-stigmatizing-countries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=35854","title":{"rendered":"WHO revising COVID-19 variant naming to avoid stigmatizing countries"},"content":{"rendered":"

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced changes to how it will label COVID-19 variants on Monday, saying the variants will be named using letters of the Greek alphabet instead of the place where they were first discovered.<\/p>\n

The WHO declared that variants of interest and variants of concern will receive a designated Greek letter listed\u00a0on its website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Researchers will continue to use the scientific names for each variant, created by Pango and GISAID, because the names include helpful information on the strains.<\/p>\n

Why the change:\u00a0<\/strong>The naming system was developed after the WHO\u00a0consulted experts<\/a>\u00a0from around the world following concerns that labeling the variants by their location of discovery is \u201cstigmatizing\u201d and \u201cdiscriminatory.\u201d<\/p>\n

The international health organization predicts the new system \u201cwill be easier and more practical\u201d for nonscientists to use.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile they have their advantages, these scientific names can be difficult to say and recall, and are prone to misreporting,\u201d the WHO said in a statement. \u201cAs a result, people often resort to calling variants by the places where they are detected, which is stigmatizing and discriminatory.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo avoid this and to simplify public communications, WHO encourages national authorities, media outlets and others to adopt these new labels,\u201d the statement continued.<\/p>\n

New names:\u00a0<\/strong>The WHO identifies four \u201cvariants of concern,\u201d including B.1.1.7, the variant first discovered in the United Kingdom, which will be called Alpha. The B.1.351 variant first found in South Africa was labeled as Beta, the P.1 variant first discovered in Brazil became Gamma and the B.1.617.2 variant first detected in India is now Delta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35855,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35854\/revisions\/35855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}