Whenever Gytis Dudas, PhD, a research professor and principal investigator at Vilnius University in Lithuania, discovers a new virus, he gets excited not just for the breakthrough but also for the chance to do something playful: Name the virus.
Dudas and his team have named viruses after deities in Baltic folklore (Barstukas, a small mythical creature that hides beneath tree stumps), Lithuanian words (Galbūt, meaning “maybe,” because researchers were initially unsure that it was a genuine virus), and his wife’s cat (Gordis, which means “fatty” in Spanish).
While Dudas has fun with the names, he knows his choices carry serious, long-term impacts: The names reside, perhaps forever, in databases that are used by scientists around the world who research viruses.
“It comes down to the person who first publishes about that virus and the name they use,” says Elliot Lefkowitz, PhD, a professor of microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and data secretary for the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV). Although the ICTV eventually determines the official scientific name for a virus, the first name that’s published by researchers or physicians “is the one that tends to stick.”
The names first given by researchers can be based on the place where the virus or disease was discovered, an animal or insect that carries it, genetic features, the names of the primary researchers, or anything that the researcher cares about — such as a story character or a pet. While those who make the discoveries often name them according to biological conventions, scientists can get creative.
“That original name — it’s entirely up to you,” Lefkowitz notes.
Occasionally, virus or disease names inadvertently stigmatize countries, communities, and groups of people. Academic researchers and the governing bodies that oversee names for viruses and diseases strive to avoid that stigma. The scientifically official names are usually determined by two organizations charged with that task: the World Health Organization (WHO) for diseases, and the ICTV, for viruses.
Below are examples of how scientists have created distinctive names for new viruses and diseases.
Quirky and whimsical
Dudas is far from the only scientist to have fun naming discoveries. Names are often given to describe a condition or pathogen in ways that people can easily understand and remember, or to honor something in their lives.
Sputnik virophage
In 2008, a team of scientists at the Université de la Méditerranée, in Marseille, France, discovered a DNA virus that replicates inside amoebas that have already been infected by a giant virus. What was striking about the new virus was that it used the replication system of the target virus to replicate itself.
The scientific team named the virus after the famous Russian satellite because the virus behaves like a satellite going around a larger entity (a planet). They added “virophage,” which means “virus eater,” to the name.
WU polyomavirus
In 2007 a multi-institutional team of researchers, led by the Washington University School of Medicine, in St. Louis, identified a human polyomavirus in patients with acute respiratory tract infections. They named the virus after the university: WU polyomavirus. Subsequent studies found WU virus in children with pneumonia, bronchiolitis, and upper-respiratory illness, but often along with other respiratory viruses, making it difficult to determine which virus caused the illnesses.
Renna virus
In 2019, virologist Joseph Fauver, PhD, published a paper describing his team’s discovery (at Colorado State University) of a new virus in mosquitoes. The significance was not so much in the virus but in the method of discovery, which demonstrated how removing certain genetic material from the sequence sample of a mosquito can make it easier to find viruses that mosquitoes carry.
Fauver named the virus after his late dog, Renna. Fauver, his partner, and Renna were later profiled in the Omaha World-Herald, in Nebraska, where the virologist now leads the Fauver Lab at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Dudas says that learning about this inspired him to name a virus after his wife’s cat.
The place
Naming a virus or disease after the place where it was discovered was long a standard practice, but that practice “tends to be falling out of common use because of the stigma [that is sometimes] attached to the place,” Lefkowitz explains. As for diseases and virus species already named after a place, renaming them is rare; that would disrupt the continuity of scientific literature, databases, and vaccine records.
“Once a name has been defined and has come into common use, it is very hard to change [it],” Lefkowitz notes.
Ebola
This viral disease, discovered in 1976 in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), was named after the Ebola River by an international commission that convened to address the first recognized outbreak. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) virologist Karl Johnson, MD, had successfully proposed naming the virus after the river, rather than after the village where the initial outbreak had taken place. He worried that calling it Yambuku virus (as the commission had proposed) would stigmatize that community.
Stigmatization arose decades later. When a major outbreak of the disease spread through several West African countries in 2014, it drew worldwide attention, and the name “Ebola” publicly became a shorthand for the region. Fear of the virus grew into fear of, and often discrimination against, the people in that region. As a result, the WHO issued guidance to avoid using geographic names for new diseases.
Lyme disease
Researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine named this tick-borne disease after Lyme, Connecticut, where they investigated an unusual cluster of arthritis cases in the mid-1970s. They first named it Lyme arthritis, but changed the name after learning that the disease affects multiple organs.
Sin Nobre virus
Teams of federal and state scientists, led by the CDC, investigated an outbreak of fatal respiratory failure in Navajo communities in four Southwestern states in 1993. After the team identified the virus responsible for the illness, the CDC proposed naming it Muerto Canyon virus, after a canyon within the Navajo Nation. Navajo leaders organized to demand a different name. At a loss, the CDC chose a Spanish phrase that means “no name.”
MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome)
This disease has a long and complicated naming history. The scientist credited with discovering it, Ali Mohamed Zaki, did not name it. It was first labeled HCoV-EMC (human coronavirus – Erasmus Medical Centre) by the scientists who confirmed it as a new coronavirus. They worked at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
But researchers around the world kept using a variety of names, so the ICTV put its foot down: It renamed the virus the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), to provide a uniform designation. The public and media came to refer to it as MERS, for short.
The organism
Sometimes scientists who discover a virus name it after the insect or animal that they believe is the host (the organism through which a virus replicates). The problem, Dudas says, is that “it is oftentimes very difficult to tell” what the host might be. While a virus might be discovered in bats, for example, years later scientists might learn that it came from another organism and did not actually infect bats.
Mpox
This exemplifies two risks in naming diseases and their related viruses: basing a name on an animal in which the disease and virus were discovered, and using a name that can stigmatize certain groups of people.
Preben Christian Alexander von Magnus, DrMed, a Danish virologist at Copenhagen’s Statens Serum Institut, discovered the disease and named it “monkeypox” because the virus was first isolated, in 1958, in monkeys. Subsequent research led scientists to believe that the virus comes from small mammals, such as rodents, that infect monkeys.
Many people viewed use of the term monkeypox as offensive, leading WHO to adopt “mpox” as the preferred disease name in 2022. ICTV renamed the monkeypox virus — in a revision of its naming protocols — to Orthopoxvirus monkeypox. An ICTV leader said that dropping “monkeypox” from the name could disconnect decades of past scientific research on the virus from future research.
Rosavirus
Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, a professor of laboratory medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of California San Francisco Department of Medicine, discovered this virus in wild rodents. The first part of the name is an acronym form of “ROdent Stool-Associated picornavirus.” (This is distinct from rotavirus.) It has not been established that rosavirus causes human disease.
The scientists
Countless viruses and diseases are named after the lead scientists in the discoveries. But that’s not a reflection of ego. The common practice has been for other scientists to create the eponymous names to honor their colleagues for their discoveries.
Alzheimer’s disease
Alois Alzheimer, MD, a psychiatrist and neuropathologist at the Royal Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Munich, first described this syndrome in a paper in1907 but did not name it. He called it “a peculiar disease of the cerebral cortex.” A collaborator, Emil Kraepelin, MD, subsequently named the disease after his colleague in his Handbook of Psychiatry.
Epstein-Barr virus
Michael Anthony Epstein, DSc, and Yvonne Margaret Barr, DPhil, were among three scientists who published a paper in 1964 describing the virus, but the two did not give it a name. The name was coined in 1968 by Werner Henle, MD, and Gertrude Henle, MD, a husband-and-wife team of virologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. They collaborated with Epstein and Barr (who were based in London) on research into the virus after its discovery.
The Epstein-Barr name is rare in that it includes a female scientist. Women scientists have been almost completely left out of eponymous names for diseases and viruses, because the discoveries were made before women were widely permitted to practice as physicians (as noted by the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities), but also because women’s contributions were downplayed (as noted in this article from the Medical Journal of Australia).
Diamond’s diseases
Louis K. Diamond, MD, a professor at Harvard Medical School, played the lead role in discovering at least three diseases that bear his name: Diamond-Blackfan syndrome (an inherited anemia), Gardner-Diamond syndrome (marked by recurrent, painful bruises that often follow emotional or physical stress), and Shwachman-Diamond syndrome (a type of bone marrow failure). Each eponymous name was subsequently adopted in various medical literature, such as this article, to honor the lead researchers.
