Hi ScriptVet! You made a post a while ago talking about diseases. Can you please expand on that post and teach how to make up new disease names and plausible epidemics/illnesses without sounding lame? Thank you so much!
There are certainly real world diseases that have silly sounding names. When a respiratory coronavirus outbreak occurred in 2003 medicine was quick to label it by its symptoms, Acute Respiratory Syndrome, until they realized what that acronym sounded like and stuck Severe onto the front, thus naming it SARS.
There are a few conventions when it comes to naming diseases, and if you follow them then your fictional diseases will at least sound plausible.
Historical and Common Names.
Common names don’t always tell you much about the disease, but they’re easy to say and remember. Unless you already know, the names of Cushing’s Syndrome and Addison’s Disease don’t tell you much about what’s going on with the patient, but their technical names, hyperadrenocorticism and hypoadrenocorticism do.
Historical and Common names may be named after the discoverer or describer (Huntington’s), the first identified sufferer (Mortimer’s disease), the place it was first identified (West Nile Virus), non-human species associated with it (swine flu), or the appearance of classical lesions (ringworm, moon blindness).
These names are useful in the short term, particularly for emerging diseases where we haven’t identified a cause yet, because you need to give something a name to effectively talk about it.
To name a disease in a way that is more useful for medicine (veterinary, human or other) we may describe the pathology instead. There are multiple terms used in crafting these descriptions.
Severity - An optional description, but still a useful one, ranging from mild to severe. A more colorful, but not necessarily technical, description may include the term ‘catastrophic’
Time - a pathology may be acute (happened fast) or chronic (happened over a long period of time), or subacute (between the two)
Organs or regions affected - pathology might be limited to one organ (liver) or a whole system (respiratory) or multiple organs (multi) or just about everything (generalized or systemic)
How they are affected - organs or tissues may be inflamed (-itis), necrotic or dying (-osis), growing more cells (hyperplasia), cells growing larger (hypertrophy) etc. There are lots of things that can go wrong with an organ or tissue, and you should scroll through this glossary for prefixes and suffixes for ideas.
Generally a pathological description will follow the pattern of Severity, Time, Where and What.
So you might have a severe, acute, hepatitis, or a mild chronic pancreatitis.
Additional details can be added (such as a supprative or parasitic hepatitis), if these are known at the time.
Naming a disease by it’s causative agent is generally recommended to avoid confusion. This is where you can have a lot more creativity in naming the bacteria, virus, fungus, parasite, amoeba or other pathogen that has caused your fictional disease.
The disease, or rather the symptoms of the disease can then be talked about in terms of the causative agent, and may be shortened further for ease of communication, eg parvoviral enteritis vs parvovirus vs parvo.
There are lots of different ways diseases can be caused and transmitted, but I think that will need to be spaced out across several posts to explain that topic well.
In the modern world, the most common names are often chosen by the media, rather than medical bodies. The media tends to latch on to anything they think is catchy, and once that gets around social media it’s difficult to convince the general public to switch names.
