What's in a name?

Richard Thompson, communications officer for the World Health Organization's Communicable Diseases Section, told William Safire of the New York Times 1 that the selection of “severe acute respiratory syndrome” as the disease's official moniker involved lengthy debate. “We wanted a name that would not stigmatize a location, such as ‘the Hanoi disease.’ We first thought of A.P.W.D., or Atypical Pneumonia Without Diagnosis, and I'm glad we dropped that. Then we simply described the disease in another way, and it was in front of us — Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS.” Thompson says both qualifying adjectives were needed: “In medicine, severe is ‘grave’ and acute means ‘suddenly.’ This respiratory syndrome caused great harm (severe) and had a rapid onset (acute).”

Patrick Sullivan News Editor CMAJ