# 7282
The novel coronavirus, which first surfaced on the Arabian peninsula a little more than a year ago, has gone by a variety of names, including novel coronavirus, nCoV, hCoV-EMC, and (even worse for those of us with chronic carpel tunnel problems) betacoronavirus 2c EMC2012.
About 10 days ago Martin Enserink brought us details of a new naming convention (see Picking A Novel Name For A Novel Virus) for the novel coronavirus, proposed by an international group of experts.
Their solution?
Call it Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). Or just MERS.
Their paper was published earlier this week in the Journal of Virology (see Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV); Announcement of the Coronavirus Study Group) and yesterday, the World Health Organization embraced the term in the following statement.
Novel coronavirus update – new virus to be called MERS-CoV
Virologist and blogger Ian MacKay from his Virology Down Under website (which, if you aren’t reading, you should) takes a closer look at how future variants of this virus will be labeled in:
Ian also maintains a terrific webpage on the H7N9 virus (see VDU H7N9) and you’ll find links to his sites on my sidebar.
Admittedly, not everyone is on board with this new name, with some feeling it unfairly stigmatizes a region of the world.
We’ll have to see if the CDC, ECDC, Hong Kong’s CHP, the PHAC, and others follow the WHO’s lead in calling this virus MERS-CoV. Ideal name or not, having everyone on the same page with what we call this virus would be an advantage.
While I’m not exactly in love with the term (for my tastes, it sounds a bit too much like MRSA) - it has now been adopted by the World Health Organization - so I’ll be using MERS and MERS-COV in this blog (with an occasional aka nCoV to aid in the transition) going forward.
