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World Health Organization Spurns Calls to Cancel or Move the Olympics Due to Zika

posted by cmn32480 on Monday May 30 2016, @09:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the power-of-the-dollar dept.

takyon writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @06:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @06:22PM (#352702)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @07:05PM (#352719)

    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:

    Even though repeated fetal HC measurements depicted HC smaller than − 2 SD in the study group, only two of the 20 (10%) children were found to be microcephalic at birth, and another three (15%) were microcephalic at the time of the neuropsychological examination. This discrepancy between prenatal and postnatal findings is disturbing and difficult to explain.

    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.