Infectious diseases

The last entry is immunodéprimé, and the rendering it invites is one no English ward ever writes. « Immunodepressed » turns up in translated prose and is understood, but no British clinician reaches for it, and its absence is not a matter of fashion. English divided this ground into three words that are not interchangeable. « Immunosuppressed » names a state somebody has been put into on purpose, by the drugs given after a transplant or by chemotherapy. « Immunodeficient » names a fault in the defences themselves, whether inherited or acquired later. « Immunocompromised » is the umbrella that covers both, and it is the word to reach for whenever the cause is not being stated. Immunodéprimé does the work of all three at once, which is why un patient immunodéprimé is almost always « an immunocompromised patient », and why a translator who picks one of the other two has quietly added a fact the French did not supply. Keep « depressed » for what it does in English — a mood, a market, a fracture of the skull — and leave the immune system out of it.