I remember when I first heard the term “Kung Flu”
I’m a sucker for puns and plays on words, so I laughed initially, but then realized that was a pretty awful thing to call a deadly disease that was killing people around the world at a growing pace. Then the reports of xenophobia and violence against Asian people poured in.
Recently I was reading a blog to learn more about a local politician and saw his common use of the term “Wuhan Flu” instead of COVID-19. Wuhan flu, China Virus, and Kung Flu are all problematic terms as they inadvertently blame China for the creation of the virus. It’s similar to the “Spanish Flu” which actually originated in the United States but was brought to Spain during WWI, spread rapidly there, and was widely reported on while places like the United States covered up the spread of the disease to not appear weak during the war. Like Asian people today, Spaniards and other people in Europe that were considered undesirable by American immigration officials were blamed for causing and spreading the disease, which led to immigration restrictions. For Chinese immigrants in the 1880s, claims of the immigrants being carriers of contagious diseases was a major point in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. With historical backing like this, it’s not a surprise that the World Health Organization changed their methods of naming diseases to keep people from blaming others for living where a disease originated.
“Viruses know no borders and they don’t care about your ethnicity, the color of your skin or how much money you have in the bank. So it’s really important we be careful in the language we use lest it lead to the profiling of individuals associated with the virus,”
Dr. Mike Ryan, WHO Emergency Program Executive Director
It might seem trivial, but the names we attribute to things do really have impacts on people- I’ll talk more about that in a later post.
Click this link for helpful ways to replace problematic and hurtful descriptions of COVID with more informative ones.
Katie Buesch 