• Question: how do people come up with the names of diseases and how did disease such as tuberculosis and smallpox come to exist?

    Asked by sophieleah1 to Hitesh, Hywel, Mae, Nik, Tiffany on 14 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Tiffany Taylor

      Tiffany Taylor answered on 14 Jun 2012:

      Diseases can be named for lots of reason, for example, small pox is named because of the symptoms of the disease, a pox is like a little boil of the skin, and if you have small pox lots of these little boils cover your skin. Tuberculosis got it’s name because small tubercules (which are little growths of tissue) grow in the lungs, so again this is a symptom of the disease. Alzheimer’s was named after the neuroscientist (brain scientist) who discovered it (Alois Alzheimer)… and there are lots of other examples I wont bore you with.

      But how did diseases come to exist is a really good question, and something we study a lot. We live with lots of bacteria and viruses that don’t make us sick, so why would some evolve to make us sick? It’s usually either because, it is the fastest way for the bacteria or virus to grow and multiply, by using a person (which we call a “host”), because they are warm, moist, have lots of food and provide a nice home where they can grow and multiply quickly. Because humans are also very social (we live in groups), they can easily be passed onto another person, and carry on growing. But the bacteria or virus must balance it right, if they get us too sick too quickly (or even kill us!) they will not be able to be passed on to as many people (because you’ll die first), and so they won’t do as well. For example the HIV virus lies quiet for years before it kills it’s host, or the horrible flu doesn’t kill us, but it makes us cough and sneeze, a great way to pass it on to lots of other people! Often the ones that are REALLY harmful to us, and kill us very quickly are diseases which have crossed over from another animal. That’s why we get scared by things like “bird flu” and “swine flu”, because they have the potential to be very harmful, because the virus is not designed for our bodies and so wont behave as it should.

      It’s all about Evolution.

    • Photo: Nicola Ibberson

      Nicola Ibberson answered on 14 Jun 2012:

      Diseases can be named for all sorts of reasons! Often it is simply the name of the person who discovered it or characterised it – such as Parkinson’s disease or Huntington disease. They may be given Latin or Greek names which describe the symptoms associated with the disease – such as herpes (Greek for ‘creeping’) or may simply just be a combination of medical terms that describe the illness – the most simple being something like ‘breast cancer’, going up to complex things like ‘dentatorubral-pallidoluysian atrophy’ (which gets called DRPLA for short, thankfully!).

      The origins of smallpox (a disease caused by a virus) and tuberculosis (a bacterial disease) are difficult to trace exactly, as they have been around for a long time. However, we know that bacteria and viruses can reproduce really fast (no waiting nine months for their babies!) and that their DNA changes around a lot – they can even pick up bits of DNA from their mates to speed things along! So it is probable that these diseases developed when the smallpox virus and the tuberculosis bacteria picked up a change in their DNA that gave them the ability to invade human cells and harm them.

    • Photo: Hitesh Dave

      Hitesh Dave answered on 21 Jun 2012:

      Most of the names of disease comes from either type of disease or the area its affecting…Sometime if its new disease it may be recognised by scientist’s name…

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