With the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, rapidly approaching, athletes face health dangers. And no, Zika isn’t the biggest threat. That would be the polluted waterways, including sewage-filled Guanabara Bay, which Brazil promised would be cleaned up for the Olympics, but have not.
Last week, the U.N.’s World Health Organization said the Games do not need to be moved or postponed — as other have advised — because there is a “very low risk” of further spread of Zika during that time. While Brazil is at the epicenter of the outbreak, with more than 100,000 cases of the mosquito-borne illness reported, WHO scientists say that there is little chance those numbers will grow because the Olympics take place during Brazil’s winter, when the transmission of viruses, are minimal. Only pregnant women are advised to avoid traveling to the Olympics.
The WHO took its stance, however, after 223 scientists, doctors, bioethicists and public health experts, signed a letter urging the move or postponement of the Olympics, since the WHO itself had earlier declared Zika a “Public health emergency of international concern,” Forbes reported.
The concerns of these health officials can’t be dismissed as easily as WHO and Brazil would like. Each athlete and traveler must make up his or her own mind on whether to participate and/or attend the Olympics, depending on whose word they decide to trust.
Disturbingly, Reuters reported last week that scientists in two studies have found dangerous drug-resistant “super bacteria” off Rio beaches that will host swimming events and in a lagoon where rowing and canoe athletes will compete. Waste from countless hospitals, in addition to hundreds of thousands of households, pours into storm drains, rivers and streams crisscrossing Rio, allowing the super bacteria to spread outside the city’s hospitals in recent years, Reuters reported.
“These bacteria should not be present in these waters. They should not be present in the sea,” said Renata Picao, a professor at Rio’s federal university, adding that contamination of Rio’s beaches was the result of a lack of basic sanitation in the metro area of 12 million people.
Last August, 13 rowers on the 40-member U.S. team came down with stomach illness at the World Rowing Junior Championships in Rio and the team doctor said she suspected it was due to pollution in the lake where the competition took place. (Where 37 tons of dead fish were removed last year…)
The Mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, told the Independent that Zika and super bacteria are not real concerns when it comes to hosting the Olympics. The biggest problem, he said, is a current crime wave. But the police and military will keep Rio safe, he added. (To support his argument, on Sunday a group of heavily armed men stormed a Rio hospital to free a suspected drug trafficker, sparking a shootout with officers that left a patient dead and a nurse and an off-duty policeman wounded.)
Brazilians, Olympic athletes, spectators, visitors, and the environment all deserve better.
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