Are names of diseases ever capitalized? For example, I'm trying to determine if the following is correct:
The plaintiff could no longer work due to a health condition called pertussis.
capitalization
Are names of diseases ever capitalized? For example, I'm trying to determine if the following is correct:
The plaintiff could no longer work due to a health condition called pertussis.
Best Answer
General Rule
Generally, style guides agree that the names of diseases are not routinely capitalized. However, style guides also agree that any part of the name of a disease that is a proper noun in its own right is usually capitalized.
(From "Do I Capitalize This Word?", at APA Style Blog.)
(From "Section 9.1: Capitalization" in The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing.)
[From The Associated Press Stylebook, as quoted at Glossophilia in "Capitalizing and pronouncing Ebola (and the naming of other diseases)".]
Other style guides that I consulted, online and off, did not differ substantively from the APA Style Guide, Mayfield Handbook and AP Stylebook with regard to capitalizing disease names.
Note: If the use of a specific style guide is mandated for writing containing the names of diseases, that style guide should be consulted and any rules or exceptions therein should be observed.
Special Cases, Exceptions
(op. cit.)
These conventions for the scientific names of organisms may apply when the name of a disease is also the name of a family or genus of organisms, as shown by Salmonella in the following excerpt from the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine:
(Influenza. (n.d.) Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine. (2008). Retrieved November 9 2015 from http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/influenza.)
Observe that "rotavirus" is neither italicized nor capitalized. This seeming anomaly is due to "rotavirus" being the name of a virus used generically. A virus is not a species:
(From "Scientific Nomenclature", in Emerging Infectious Diseases.)
Black Death is frequently used as the popular name of bubonic plague. It may, however, refer instead to a historical event, an epidemic of bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, and it is then capitalized according to the convention detailed at, for example, WriteExpress:
(From WriteExpress, "How to Capitalize".)
Spanish Flu, as an abridgement of "1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic", or as an abridgement of any of the various names given to that historical event, observes the usual convention with respect to the capitalization of historical events. When the name is used instead with reference to the disease, then "Spanish", being a specific name (proper noun), retains its capitalization: so, if the reference is not an abridgement of the name of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic event, but rather a reference to a disease only, the conventional capitalization is "Spanish flu".
When this assimilation has occurred may be difficult to ascertain, but generally, as mentioned earlier, a good dictionary will show the term with capitalization as encountered in use. However, the chosen dictionary may also present multiple options for capitalization, and it will remain entirely up to individual writers to discern and choose the most appropriate form.
This perhaps troublesome assimilation of the specificity of proper nouns has at least partly occurred with the name "Black Death". For example, "Black Death" is allowed two forms by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:
(From "black death", at Merriam-Webster.)
It can safely be assumed, given the usual conventions for disease names and the names of historical events, that what the dictionary refers to as "often capitalized B&D" is that no capitalization was frequently encountered by lexicographers when the term was used with sense 1, while capitalization of both words was frequently encountered when the term was used with sense 2.