Zika won’t stop Rio Olympics, despite significant health concerns

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

The Rio Olympics will forge ahead, despite a Canadian professor’s calls for the Games be moved or postponed in light of the Zika virus.

The confirmation follows comments from University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran in the Harvard Public Health Review that allowing the games to continue in Brazil as scheduled could lead to a “a full-blown global health disaster.”

But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sees no need to delay the games, based on advice from the World Health Organization (WHO). Officials say they’re confident the situation will get better in the next three months, but plan to watch the situation in Rio, where the virus is thriving, “very closely.”

“The clear statements from WHO that there should be no restrictions on travel and trade means there is no justification for cancelling, delaying, postponing or moving the Rio games,” IOC medical director Richard Budgett told the Associated Press.

The viral strain now in Brazil, Attaran says, is “clearly new, different, and vastly more dangerous,” with what appears to be a “truly causal” relationship to microcephaly — in Brazil, Attaran writes, the effects of microcephaly have been “suggestive of ‘fetal brain disruption sequence’ in which the developing brain and skull collapse while other anatomical features like the scalp skin keep growing.”

Read full, original post: The Olympics Won’t Be Cancelled Over Zika, so Keep It in Your Pants and Use Bug Spray

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