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Harvard Scientist: Rio Olympics Could Spark 'Full Blown Global Health Disaster' (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: Doctors have warned that the upcoming 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro could spark a "full-blown public health disaster" with the spread of the Zika virus. The World Health Organization has declared a health emergency in response to the disease's spread through Latin America. Rio has the highest number of cases of any state in the country. Dr Amir Attaran said in the Harvard Public Health Review the Olympic Games could increase the spread of the virus, suggesting the Games should be hosted by a different city in Brazil. "While Brazil's Zika inevitably will spread globally, given enough time, viruses always do -- it helps nobody to speed that up," he said. "In particular, it cannot possibly help when an estimated 500,000 foreign tourists flock into Rio for the Games, potentially becoming infected, and returning to their homes where both local Aedes mosquitoes and sexual transmission can establish new outbreaks." It's highly unlikely the virus will cause officials to take drastic action since the Games start on August 5th. With economic and political issues in the country, the Zika virus is just one more thing undermining confidence in the country's ability to host the Olympics. It was reported earlier this year that Rio has given up on its promise to eliminate 80 percent of the sewage found in the city's notoriously filthy water.
The games are two and a half months away. Preparations for hosting them take years. I can't see the point in this guy's comments, other than as an attempt to garner some cheap publicity.
#DeleteChrome
Who cares about the water and dying children? They have a good soccer team. Get your priorities straight. More stadiums!
Harmful to the host city? Check. (Currently impeaching their president for this among other things.)
Harmful to the people of the host country? Check. (Funds were diverted to fund Olympic construction.)
Harmful to the athletes competing? Check. (Zika and raw sewage, a tasty cocktail.)
Harmful to the spectators? Check. (Ditto.)
The IOC is a criminal organization.
The pollution, on the other hand, is indeed hazardous. And those are GMO mosquitoes from 2012 onward that are causing the microcephaly and miscarriages, not the virus.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Am I the only one who doesn't give a crap about the Olympics?
Human greed and self-interest at the expense of pragmatic decision-making. Wouldn't it be something if it were a new story.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If there were time, then I wonder if Olympic training grounds could be used for the Olympics, like these training grounds in the US and Canada. They would have to accommodate spectators - food, lodging, parking, emergency services, plus a place to watch the olympic games. It's too late to get that set up now.
Or if all else fails, they could hold the Olympics in a healthy place (including clean water) without thousands of visitors, and just televise the games. It would be sort of weird for there not to be any crowds cheering and applauding.
There is the potential for 10's of thousands, or perhaps 100's of thousands of people to get infected in Rio alone. Then when they go home they'll infect others.
Shouldn't we have a say? It can't just be up to the up to the IOC or Brazilian officials. These people are going to come back to our countries and potentially infect everyone else. Tens of thousands of people coming back to our cities with this thing sounds pretty scary to me.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Don't cancel the Olympics. Instead, just ban spectators. No exposure of visitors to the virus, the crime rate, and the political rioting. No traffic mess. Security could concentrate on protecting the athletes and camera crews in a trouble-free bubble. The marine events would be held here: http://riotimesonline.com/braz...
Freed of the high costs of managing spectators, the Olympics would be purely a media event, with increased profits from the TV rights. This Olympics could net more than any its predecessors.
I was obsessed with the Olympics last year... it ends up my city (Oslo, Norway) was bidding to host the Olympics.
We just spend 5-6 years building seven 10 story buildings and some other stuff around it. They're still not done. I think we used only one legged construction workers and took away their walking sticks for safety reasons.
Some dimwitted buffoon seemed to think it was a good idea to through this entire city into 6-8 years of sheer devastation and disaster on a scale that could only be considered criminal to host a few weeks of people playing games. This city would never be able to build that infrastructure in that time... we simply don't know how. In additional, we would never recover from it. 30 years (I think) later and this country still has trash from the Olympics laying around.
I was obsessed with convincing people to make sure the vote went against the Olympics. I don't mind people getting their rocks off on watching people (usually of their own gender) getting hot and sweaty. If they're into that, it's really not my problem. But I sure as hell don't want to spend an extra hour getting to work for 8 years so they can do so.
While I agree with your sentiment... they way you present it leads me to say that the answer is clearly no.
"Shouldn't we have a say?"... the world doesn't work that way. If you want a say, you simply have to say it. If you need to ask it first, then your opinion is too passive and is utterly irrelevant and carries no power.
Are you seriously suggesting that when voicing your opinion in what would be perceived as opposition to an event focused entirely on measure of strength and physical prowess that your passive voice will mean anything? You will be simply unrepresented which you simply always are. Do not feel bad, so am I. I haven't been represented in government since shortly after I was born.
You can choose to live in fear and anger. You can feel bitter about it and whine and say things like "Shouldn't we have a say?" as if you're trying to rouse the rabble to your passive voice. Or you can simply live your life each day.
I have no interest in religion beyond personal entertainment in the same way I like The Three Stooges but I've always had a warm spot for the Serenity Prayer which goes something like this :
Pizza Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
I'll add :
And the intelligence to live my life without the fear Fox, CNN and NBC are trying to force down my throat 24/7
P.S. Thank you Pizza Lord for giving us Elon Musk. He's a fucking asshole but at least the "Doom New Networks" will take an occasional break from their broadcasts of "Hell and damnation is here" long enough to share one of his Shitter Twitters with us.
Phrasing, dude.
Should of been Chicago!
More ideas: The Olympic Games will be in August, which is winter in the southern hemisphere. In Rio and most of Brazil, winter is still warm.
From the Slashdot story summary: "It was reported earlier this year that Rio has given up on its promise to eliminate 80 percent of the sewage found in the city's notoriously filthy water."
I've only been in Rio, at separate times, for maybe 3 weeks total. I haven't seen "notoriously filthy water". The heavily polluted area is in Guanabara Bay, I understand. This is a mostly true but sometimes exaggerated discussion of beaches in Rio: Beaches in Rio de Janeiro. (The article mentions where it exaggerates.)
The Brazilian media constantly emphasizes violent events in Brazilian cities. However, the murder rate in Rio de Janeiro was, the last time I checked, less than two-thirds of the murder rate in the U.S. capital city, Washington, D.C.
Discussions of the song, The Girl From Ipanema, are usually examples of cultures outside of Brazil not reporting Brazilian culture accurately. The author, Antonio Carlos Jobim, was sitting in a restaurant, I suppose, writing that song. If he had wanted to talk with that woman, she almost certainly would have been happy to talk with him. That's been my experience, and I'm not as physically attractive as was Jobim.
Many people live in the area surrounding Guanabara Bay, Go there. People from the U.S. will see that the people everywhere in Rio are generally far more healthy-looking than people in the United States.
I live in Rio and the Olympic games should not have been held here, for several reasons, but Zika is not one of them.
The summary is phrased in way that give the impression the guy is a medical doctor, when actually he has a doctorate in law, and although he writes for the health review, he doesn't have a medical research background.
Zika has already spread pretty much to everywhere that has the mosquito (aedes aegypt and others) and the olympics will not cause much of an impact, specially because it will happen in the winter, when the mosquito borne diseases almost disappear, because the mosquito population drops sharply due to the smaller amount of rain. And by the way, Rio is NOT the place with the highest amount of cases of any state, of either Zika or microcephaly.
Further more, Zika is a very mild infection for the great majority of people infected, with most (~80%) not even being symptomatic, and did not grabbed the headlines until Brazilian health and safety authorities connected the increase of microcephaly cases to Zika infections.
The only risk for the guests is if they are women, pregnant or planning to get pregnant at the times of the games, or if they fuck everything that moves (in that case, call me ^-^) and the risk of getting pregnant can be easily avoided by either not coming (as suggested) or by simply using anti-conceptional methods.
Reminds me of Tom Clancy's novel "Rainbow Six", in which a small clique of conspirators plot to slash the global population so they can rule over a pristine world with more natural resources for themselves. In that novel the terrorists arrange to distribute a specially tailored virus at the Olympic Games. While lethal to anyone who has not previously been inoculated against it, the virus has a latency period of three weeks or so, allowing visitors to the Olympics to reach their homes all around the world before they fall sick - and transmit the virus to everyone around them. Luckily natural pathogens are self-limiting to a greater or lesser extent.
While the doctor's motives may be the best, his suggestion is completely impractical. It takes years to prepare a city to host the Olympics, and most of the preparations (such as stadiums and housing) cannot be moved elsewhere at short notice.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Hey, the first banana republic Olympic games. Where the rich and privileged further bankrupt the country to shove aside the poor in a squalid 21st century hell-hole.
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the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This Zika threat is no Amateur Night shit. Zika reads like something from an action-adventure movie, where the evil mastermind weaponizes a virus and releases it into the world to bring about an apocalypse. Transmission via mosquito is just the beginning, it can be transmitted from person to person, and in an adult it's mild enough that anyone who isn't specifically diagnosed with it could easily shrug it off as nothing to worry about. I could see it wrecking an entire generation (or more) if not stopped. Where the games are planned on being held is literally where Zika is the worst and you're going to have hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world show up and congregate in one place? Madness. Move the goddamned Games to some other country. We don't need to help the Zika virus spread all over the goddamned planet.
..and before some asshat accuses me of it: This ain't about 'brown people' or any such bullshit; if Zika became a pandemic, it would affect all people from all ethnic backgrounds. We'd have microcephaly cases in newborns all over the place, white, black, brown, yellow, or what-have-you. Let's not, OK? Move the damned Olympics!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
They're all damn dirty Earthers. The place is disgusting and they're all 110% corrupt. Leave them down there.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What I would like to know is why not use another technology, irradiated sterile mosquitos, to bring down the mosquito populations, which would avoid the whole GMO issue, at least until more research can be done on it. Why must they use GMO skeeters when you have the irradiated technology which it appears would work just as well?