On Tuesday, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen sent a letter to Dr. Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization, to convey her concerns about this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the epicenter of a Zika virus outbreak.
While it is certainly reasonable for Shaheen to call for the WHO to evaluate just how much the games might contribute to the global spread of Zika, we do not agree with Dr. Amir Attaran, whose Harvard Public Health Review article Shaheen called a “compelling argument,” that “clearly the Rio 2016 Games must not proceed.” In her letter, Shaheen stops just short of calling for the Games to be canceled or relocated, saying, “All of the efforts underway to prevent Zika are at risk of being undone if the Olympic Games spurs a global outbreak.”
Chan, who will attend the games that begin Aug. 5, said this week: “You don’t want to bring a standstill to the world’s movement of people. This is all about risk assessment and risk management.” That strikes us as the proper perspective on a troubling outbreak.
Zika, a virus transmitted primarily by Aedes mosquitoes but can also be spread sexually, got its name from the Zika Forest in Uganda, where it was first discovered in 1947. For most people, Zika causes either no symptoms at all or mild, flu-like symptoms that rarely last more than a week. But the outbreak in Brazil that began last year has been tied to nearly 5,000 cases of microcephaly (in which babies are born with small heads and underdeveloped brains) and could be behind the rise in cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can cause temporary paralysis. More than 500 Americans, including 48 pregnant women, have contracted Zika while traveling, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but none have been infected by mosquitoes in the U.S. There is no vaccine.
Whenever there is a public health crisis, the key to responding properly is to move past fear and allow the data to drive decision-making. And the fact is that Zika is already spreading. It has been reported in 58 countries, mostly in Central and South America, and is expected to arrive soon on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The Zika genie, as public health experts Neil Rau and Richard Schabas wrote in the Globe and Mail on Wednesday, is “already out of the bottle.”
If the Brazil Games are canceled, they wrote, does that mean the NFL should cancel or move the next Super Bowl, which is set to be played in Houston? And what about baseball games, summer music festivals, parades? To single out Brazil feels an awful lot like a First World overreaction.
That brings us back to the point of Shaheen’s letter, that the 10,000 athletes and 500,000 spectators planning to attend the Rio games will possibly accelerate the global outbreak. Again, her concerns echo those of Dr. Attaran, who wrote: “Scientists can disagree on how much the mass migration of 500,000 foreigners will accelerate the virus’s global spread and make the pandemic worse – but none can possibly argue that it will slow it down or make things better.”
While that may be true, it is more fear-based than data driven. Every year, Brazil receives more than 6 million visitors from all over the world. That’s an average of 500,000 a month, exactly how many people are expected to watch the games. The equation isn’t quite that simple, however, and that’s where the WHO comes in.
What Shaheen wants is a “comprehensive evaluation of the public health risks associated with the Games being held in Brazil.” The request is legitimate and would go a long way toward replacing fear with facts. The WHO should get to work and release its findings as soon as possible.
But in the meantime, those who plan to travel to Rio in August should put their energy into educating themselves about minimizing the risk of mosquito bites rather than biting their nails.