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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, @03:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @03:21PM (#352647)

    Microsoft stands to gain a lot if the world population of pinheads increases dramatically.

    This actually isn't possible:

    Microcephaly is defined as a head circumference of 2 standard deviations (SD) below the mean for age and sex

    http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&Itemid=270&gid=32405&lang=en [paho.org]

    So about 2.5% of people are defined to have microencephaly? This brings up the question of what percent of the microencephaly cases are actually disease states rather than just people happening to be low on the curve? I had assumed microencaphly was a serious problem before, now I am not sure that is always the case. Also do these means and sds take into account cultural and racial differences? Can immigration cause a pandemic of microencephaly using this definition?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @04:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @04:12PM (#352668)

    Children with a prenatal head circumference between 2 SD and 3 SD below the gestational mean did not differ significantly from the control group regarding cognitive, language and motor functioning. However, they exhibited more behavioral-emotional problems.

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/uog.7556/full [wiley.com]

    Not a blinded study, but I'm surprised to see the majority of people diagnosed with this "disease" are apparently fine. It is more like if you devised a disease called hypo-pigmentation which included albinos that sometimes have associated problems but also includes those with less than 2 sds away from the average skin pigmentation.

    ...Even those emotional differences weren't very large (table 3). This is really starting to look shady.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @05:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @05:22PM (#352683)

    To answer my question, yes this link may be due to ethnic differences, and demographic changes can alter microcephaly incidence in the absence of any disease at all:

    These data indicate that approximately 50% of normal head size variation is familial. Because of the relationship between the head size of normal children and their parents, adjustment of a child's head size value by the average parental value permits better definition of the range of normalcy.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7189556 [nih.gov]