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The internationally accepted naming convention for influenza viruses, accepted by the WHO and followed by the (US) CDC, literally includes geographic origin in the naming of influenza viruses: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/types.htm https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395936/pdf/bul...

The WHO's recommended name for the virus that involved in its previous announced pandemic is "A(H1N1)pdm09", which literally stands for "pandemic disease Mexico 2009": https://www.who.int/influenza/gisrs_laboratory/terminology_a...

The name of this virus with respect to the naming convention mentioned above is literally "A/California/7/2009(H1N1)pdm", which you'll note has two specific places in it, one abbreviated and one not.



The world health organization changed its guidelines in 2015:

https://www.who.int/topics/infectious_diseases/naming-new-di...

Of course older diseases would not likely have their names changed.


The WHO itself posts recommendations for the composition of influenza vaccines: https://www.fludb.org/brc/vaccineRecommend.spg?decorator=inf...

For the Northern Hemisphere this flu season they recommend strains like A/Brisbane/02/2018(H1N1), A/Kansas/14/2017(H3N2), B/Colorado/06/2017, and B/Phuket/3073/2013.


Those are virus strain identifier names, not disease common names. IN that case the disease is called influenza.

The WHO advice applies to the common usage:

As these best practices only apply to disease names for common usage, they also do not affect the work of existing international authoritative bodies responsible for scientific taxonomy and nomenclature of microorganisms.

https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-new-d...


You are referring to a much different subject than the parent I was responding to, which was about the renaming to COVID-19.




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