• Question: how do viruses get there names

    Asked by ethanm on 14 Jan 2022.
    • Photo: Danielle Nader

      Danielle Nader answered on 14 Jan 2022:

      Variants of concern (Delta, Omicron, Alpha, Beta…) are part of the Greek alphabet and were given by the WHO to avoid calling the viruses by the countries they were found in. This helps to avoid discrimination and stigmatism towards residents of that country.

      But in general, for ex SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID19) was given this name by the WHO because it stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) — this is due to the symptoms it causes.

    • Photo: Sareen Galbraith

      Sareen Galbraith answered on 14 Jan 2022:

      Viruses are also often named after their characteristics, the places where they were first discovered or the symptoms they cause.

      An example of this is the name for coronavirus. This name was created from the the latin word for crown (corona) after scientists saw a picture of the coronavirus taken by a very powerful microscope (called an electron microscope). In this picture looked the virus was a circle shape and it had a ring or crown around it.

      Another example is yellow fever virus. This name was created because people who were infected with this virus had yellow coloured skin which is caused by liver damage (the medical term is jaundice).

    • Photo: Pam Vallely

      Pam Vallely answered on 17 Jan 2022:

      That’s a really interesting question. The existence of viruses was first shown in 1892 by a Russian Scientist called Dimitri Ivanowsky who showed that a disease of plants called tobacco mosaic disease was caused by a microbe much smaller than any known bacteria, but because viruses are too small to see using an ordinary microscope their structure and shape wasn’t identified until the 1960’s when a new type of microscope called the electron microscope was developed, this allowed much smaller things to be seen and viruses were seen for the first time. This meant that the diseases viruses caused were known about long before the viruses themselves were. As a result for a long time the viruses got named after the disease not the other way round. So, for example “hepatitis virus” causes inflammation in the liver or hepatitis – but there are actually 6 different viruses that cause hepatitis and they are all very different. For a long time the naming of viruses was a complete mess, there was no consistent system for doing it, some were named after the people who discovered them, some after the disease, some after the place they were discovered etc. In 1966 a big conference was held in Moscow and a new group called the “International Committee for Taxonomy of Viruses” (or ICTV) was formed. They decided that in future viruses should be classified into families depending on their characteristics and properties (shape, size, how they replicate and grow). This system works very well and if you are really interested have a look at this website https://talk.ictvonline.org
      Nowadays the ICTV names any new virus and the World Health Organisation (WHO) names the disease – so SARS-CoV-2 got its name from the ICTV and the disease was called COVID-19 by the WHO. But, lots of people still use common names for viruses. For example the correct name for Epstein Barr Virus which causes glandular fever is Human herpes virus type 4, but it was discovered by 2 people called Epstein and Barr and most people still call it EBV!

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