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When it comes to the popular naming of infectious diseases, xenophobia has long played a prominent role. Susan Sontag, in her 1988 work, AIDS and Its Metaphors (a follow-up to her extended essay from a decade earlier, Illness as Metaphor), observed that "there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. It lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical with the non-us, the alien." Cognizant of how geographic labels have been unfairly used in the past, the WHO (World Health Organization) introduced a new set of best practices for naming infectious diseases, in 2015. Geographic names are to be avoided in order to "avoid causing offense," though the WHO did not insist that already established names like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, should be retroactively changed.