The show must go on:
The World Health Organization is trying to ease concerns about spreading Zika as a result of this summer's Olympics in Rio de Janiero.
"Based on current assessment, cancelling or changing the location of the 2016 Olympics will not significantly alter the international spread of Zika virus," a statement released Saturday reads.
This comes a day after more than 150 scientists released an open letter to the head of WHO calling for the games to be moved or postponed, citing new research. "We make this call despite the widespread fatalism that the Rio 2016 Games are inevitable or 'too big to fail,'" the letter says.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @05:11PM
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5678001 [nih.gov]
So is zika linked with microcephaly or micrencephaly? If only microcephaly, is this the kind that matters, or the kind that isn't even a disease? I feel there has been some very misleading reporting on this topic.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @05:36PM
Ugh. I looked up “micrencephaly” on Wikipedia and it redirected straight to microcephaly. Please tell me you're not the kind of person who is freaking out about PG in vaporizers because you read somewhere that somebody once called it edible antifreeze. Or about vitamin K shots in newborns because you heard somewhere that the chemical can be called “phylloquinone.” Let me tell you about dihydrogen monoxide! It's all a conspiracy by the lizard people!
(As opposed to, of course, what the lizard people are actually up to….)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @05:51PM
Uh... no. I was the one citing medical literature and questioning the severity of this zika thing since many people who meet the criteria for this "disease" are apparently totally normal. Wikipedia's lack of a page doesn't pose any obstacle to me, not sure why it does to you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @06:22PM
I seem to recall even the link between Zika virus and micro(cephaly/encephaly) was more of the "correlation does not mean causation" type and not universally accepted before the issue was politicised through the WHO (who had come unter fire for downplaying the recent ebola epidemic in Africa).
Also, glancing through the list of signatories I see a lot of ethicists, some public health officials, pediatricians and entomologists, but nobody who is recognizable as a virologist or tropical disease specialist ? In that sense it looks more like a collective statement of "concerned citizens with some academic background" than the informed opinion of actual experts in the field.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @07:05PM
It seems worse than that though. The definition of this disease seems fatally flawed. It is a head circumference 2 sd below the average for that age and sex, so it automatically includes ~2.5% of the population in the absence of any disease. This assumes the circumference is normally distributed, but if it isn't close to that then using 2 sd is even more nonsensical. Even worse, you can have this disease at one age and then not have it later:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/uog.7556/full [wiley.com]
None if this is anything close to what I was imagining "microcephaly" meant (which seems to be micrencephaly). Even if Zika causes microcephaly, it could be a irrelevant due to the insanely bad definition. It may be like discovering that Zika is correlated to having long toes or something like that.