“Based on current assessment, cancelling or changing the location of the 2016 Olympics will not significantly alter the global spread of Zika virus”, a statement released Saturday reads.
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“We are concerned that World Health Organization is rejecting these alternatives because of a conflict of interest”, the letter said.
“We make this call despite the widespread fatalism that the Rio 2016 Games are inevitable or ‘too big to fail, ‘” the letter says. It has caused more than 1,000 confirmed cases of the birth defect microcephaly (in which babies are born with unusually small heads and brains) and appears to be linked to neurological and autoimmune disorders such as the paralyzing Guillain-Barre syndrome, according to a recent cover story in Time magazine.
In a public letter published online on Friday, around 150 leading public health professionals, a lot of them bioethicists, said the danger of infection from the Zika virus was expensive for the Games to go on securely.
While the W.H.O. has seemingly reneged on their February statement deeming Zika spread in the America’s to be a “global concern”, the organization’s Saturday press release made no mention of either earlier Zika related warnings, nor the letter proffered by the world health experts.
Cancelling this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio because of concerns over the Zika virus would be “unthinkable”, says Novak Djokovic.
Almost 1,300 babies have been born in Brazil with irreversible brain damage since Zika began to spread there previous year. “An unnecessary risk is posed when 500,000 foreign tourists from all countries attend the Games, potentially acquire that strain, and return home to places where it can become endemic”. Should that happen to poor, as-yet unaffected places (e.g., most of South Asia and Africa) the suffering can be great. The important thing not just for athletes but also the hundreds of thousands of people who will be travelling to Rio is that they are given the best evidence-based precautionary advice.
“How about those people living there, you know?”
Olympic Council of Malaysia (OCM) president Tan Sri Tunku Imran Tuanku Jaafar said that he believed the hosts would be safe for all athletes and the organizing committee has taken major steps to address this matter. The WHO affirmed that moving or postponing the games would “not significantly alter” the spread of the virus.
The WHO’s advice is that pregnant women should not travel to areas with Zika virus transmission, including Rio de Janeiro.
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But the United Nations health agency argued that Brazil is just one of dozens of countries reporting the transmission of the Zika virus by mosquitoes and said “people continue to travel between these countries and territories for a variety of reasons”.
