New Delhi/Geneva: The World Health Organisation, amid objections and criticism, has renamed the B.1.617.1 and B.1.617.2 variants of the COVID-19 virus, first detected in India, as Kappa and Delta, respectively.
The world health monitor on Monday named the various variants found in several countries using Greek alphabets to help remove stigma from the names and facilitate public discussions.
"While they have their advantages, these scientific names can be difficult to say and recall, and are prone to misreporting," said the WHO, explaining the decision.
India last month objected to the B.1.617 mutant of the novel coronavirus that world media dubbed as "Indian Variant", although WHO has not used the word "Indian" for the strain.
There were concerns in Africa as the South African variant, which goes by names like B.1.351, 501Y.V2 and 20H/501Y.V2 .
"No country should be stigmatised for detecting and reporting variants," said WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove.Viruses were called by the country name such as Brazil and UK.
The new labels do not replace existing scientific names, which convey important scientific information and will continue to be used in research.
"The naming system aims to prevent calling COVID-19 variants by the places where they are detected, which is stigmatizing & discriminatory,” the WHO said in a tweet, and urged all to adopt these names as they will ease public discussions about the virus of concern and interest.
WHO labels COVID variants with Greek letters
Geneva: COVID-19 variants previously labeled with their scientific names will now be renamed with Greek letters, the World Health Organization said.
The scientific names of the COVID-19 variants are often difficult to say, hard to remember and can create issues of misreporting, the Geneva-based organization said in a statement, noting that many people use the name of the country where the variant was first identified, a simple method for everyday discussions but one that can also create stigmatization for the country's population.
As an example, the variant B117 was often coined as the "British variant" due to the difficulty of remembering its exact name.According to the WHO, that specific strain of the virus will now be called the "Alpha variant."
The existing nomenclatures, created by Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data, Nextstrain and Pango, still exist and are still accepted but should mostly be used by scientists from now on, the statement declared.
The WHO urged governments, media and the general population to use the newly-created system and drop scientific names and countries of the variants' first identification in their communications.(UNI)