But, it acknowledged: “The Games will take place during Brazil’s wintertime, when there are fewer active mosquitoes and the risk of being bitten is lower”.
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Brazil is mired in the deepest recession since the 1930s, and it’s at the epicenter of the mosquito-borne Zika virus, which has been proven to cause a range of birth defects in newborn babies.
“If the International Olympic Committee and the World Health Organisation [WHO] do not have the generosity of heart to delay the games to prevent children being born and disabled their whole lives, then they’re among the cruellest institutions in the world, ” he told the Associated Press.
“The clear statements from World Health Organization that there should be no restrictions on travel and trade means there is no justification for canceling or delaying or postponing or moving the Rio Games”, Dr. Richard Budgett, the IOC’s medical director, told The Associated Press.
“And given the choice between accelerating a unsafe new disease or not – for it is impossible that the Games will slow Zika down – the answer should be a no-brainer for the Olympic organisers too”.
Writing in the Harvard Public Health Review, Dr Amir Attaran said the Games could speed up the spread of the virus, and suggested the Games could be hosted by another city in Brazil where the illness is less of a threat.
World Health Organization and PAHO say, however, that the Games are being held during the Brazilian winter when there are fewer active mosquitoes and the risk of being bitten is lower.
Pregnant women continue to be advised not to travel to areas with ongoing Zika virus transmission.
Experts say around 1.5 million people have been infected with Zika in Brazil since 2015.
Coates, also president of the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC), was in Brazil in early April for the last IOC co-ordination commission meeting, accompanied by Australian team chef de mission Kitty Chiller. Speaking hours after the Senate voted to suspend her on Thursday, Rousseff blasted the impeachment process against her as “fraudulent” and promised to fight what she characterized as an injustice more painful than the torture she endured under a past military dictatorship.
In April 2014, Coates, who had then made six trips to Brazil, said the local organizers were behind schedule “in many, many ways” and were in worse shape than Greek organizers were in preparing for the 2004 Olympics. Zika is “flourishing”, he wrote, and Rio is “the heart of the outbreak”.
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“Preparations for the Olympic Games have now entered into a very operational phase and issues such as these have much less influence than at other stages of organizing the Olympic Games”, Bach said. Dr. David Hughes said in a statement Wednesday that the Zika risk to Australian athletes was “minimal”, although he noted only the link to a condition that sometimes causes Guillain-Barre syndrome, a potentially fatal condition that also causes temporary paralysis.
