It was 27 April 2009, and Israel’s deputy health minister had convened an emergency press conference. A mysterious new flu virus was on the rampage, and the country was expected to announce its first case any minute. But as he addressed the media from a local hospital, it soon became clear that Yaakov Litzman wasn’t just there to reassure the public.

“We will call it Mexican flu,” he said, defiantly. “We won’t call it swine flu.”

Though the virus is now officially called H1N1, swine flu acquired its popular epithet almost as soon as it emerged. After all, the virus looked suspiciously like one known to infect pigs, and patient zero lived in a village next to an industrial farm that held 50,000 of the animals at any given time. (Read more about the search for "patient zero" in the coronavirus outbreak.)

Of course, in Israel the name “swine flu” was deeply offensive to the country’s Jewish and Muslim citizens, many of whom shun pork on religious grounds. The suggestion of “Mexican flu” followed a long tradition of naming viruses after the places they were discovered or emerged from.

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Think about the Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever named after a German university town; Hendra virus, which bears the name of the Brisbane suburb where it was first discovered; Zika is also a forest in Uganda; Fujian flu, which is named after a Chinese province; Ebola too carries the name of a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and the infamous Spanish flu of 1918.

On this occasion, however, the Mexican ambassador to Israel hit back with an official complaint, saying that naming the virus after his country was deeply offensive. Naturally, no one wants their country associated with a deadly disease. In the end, Israel agreed that the original name was fine – swine flu would not be rebranded.