Plant diseases and pests
International standards and resources
The American Phytopathological Society publishes a list of plant disease names(Opens in a new tab/window).
Australian conventions and resources
The Australian Plant Pest Database(Opens in a new tab/window) includes names and information about plant diseases and pests that could infect Australian commercial plants.
Names of plant diseases are often based on the name of the pathogen involved:
Fusarium wilt tomato ringspot virus infection
Other names are based on descriptions of the symptoms:
bacterial leaf spot black rot
Use British spellings and lower case for common names of plant diseases and pests, even if the disease name is usually abbreviated to an acronym. Exceptions are proper nouns and some (but not all) letters denoting type or subtype.
Asiatic citrus psyllid giant African snail Dutch elm disease Fusarium head blight
mango leaf gall midge vegetable leafminer papaya ringspot
Animal diseases
International standards and resources
The website of the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH; previously known as OIE, for ‘Office Internationale des Epizooties’) has relevant links, particularly lists of aquatic animal diseases(Opens in a new tab/window) and terrestrial animal diseases(Opens in a new tab/window).
(There are some style differences between this international listing and Australian usage, such as foot and mouth disease, which has no hyphens in the WOAH listing but does have hyphens in Australia.)
A standardised nomenclature of animal parasitic diseases(Opens in a new tab/window) is available online.
For common terms, consult a standard veterinary dictionary, such as Black’s veterinary dictionary.
Australian conventions and resources
A list of livestock diseases of importance in Australia is given in Schedule 3 of the Government and Livestock Industry Cost Sharing Deed in Respect of Emergency Animal Disease Responses(Opens in a new tab/window).
Terms to watch out for:
communicable, contagious, infectious, infective, noncommunicable, transmissible
condition, disease, disorder, illness, syndrome
cull, destroy, euthanase, kill, sacrifice, slaughter
See Health and medicine for information on human diseases and medical conditions, and Biological structure and function for the recommended terminology for postmortem examinations in humans and other animals.
Reminder. Just because the abbreviation of a term is made up of capitals, it does not mean that the term has initial capitals when it is spelled out.
Generally, the name of choice for any disease in any language should be the common term. For international communication, the most commonly used English term is preferred. Publications should include any synonyms in the list of keywords or glossary.
Use lower case for common names of diseases, even if the disease name is usually abbreviated to an acronym:
avian influenza bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)
Exceptions are proper nouns:
African swine fever Newcastle disease Rift Valley fever
Use an initial capital for diseases named after a person (eponymic terms). Unlike human disease names, the possessive s tends to be retained:
Aujeszky’s disease
Use hyphenation according to the usual rules for compound modifiers:
foot-and-mouth disease