17 Diseases Named After Places Or People

While liberals and woke media elites obsess over calling Republicans racist for using the term “Wuhan virus,” the practice of naming a new disease after a population or the site of its first major outbreak is actually pretty common. In fact, pundits used the term widely to identify the origins of the epidemic.

In this case however, it’s even more important to identify the new Wuhan coronavirus sweeping the globe with its origin in the Chinese city of Wuhan as China tried to mask the warning signs of a global outbreak and downplay its severity leading to what the World Health Organization has now declared a “global pandemic.”

Here are 17 other diseases named after populations or places:

West Nile Virus

Named after the West Nile District of Uganda discovered in 1937.

Guinea Worm

Named by European explorers for the Guinea coast of West Africa in the 1600s.

Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever

Named after the mountain range spreading across western North America first recognized first in 1896 in Idaho.

Lyme Disease

Named after a large outbreak of the disease occurred in Lyme and Old Lyme, Connecticut in the 1970s.

Ross River Fever

Named after a mosquito found to cause the disease in the Ross River of Queensland, Australia by the 1960s. The first major outbreak occurred in 1928.

More