In a recent JAMIA article,1 Deepthi Rajeeve asserts that ‘some of the existing concepts [in SNOMED CT] do not meet the case definition and do not represent reportable conditions because non-human conditions are included as children in the hierarchy’, specifically citing campylobacteriosis and porcine intestinal adenomatosis. The authors suggest creating a SNOMED CT hierarchy that is exclusively human conditions. First we must point out that the term they selected (campylobacteriosis) does not mean ‘campylobacter-induced disease in human beings’. Campylobacteriosis means (in SNOMED CT and in the real world) ‘disorder characterized by infection by any campylobacter species’. No information on the species affected is or should be implied. In fact, we believe that several disorders in this hierarchy, including the cited ‘porcine enteric adenomatosis’, are likely to be overspecified by the inclusion of species. Inclusion of species in the naming of disorders is an artifact of usage patterns that does not allow for the fact that many …