Health officials downplay risks for Zika virus during Rio Olympics

RIO DE JANEIRO – Public health officials sought to downplay the risk the mosquito-borne Zika virus poses for spectators and athletes for the Summer Olympics to be hosted here in six months.

The World Health Organization on Monday declared the Zika virus an international public health emergency, following an outbreak of the disease that seemingly originated in Brazil and is now spreading northward across the Americas, including to the United States. The virus, transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, is suspected to be the culprit in a rising number of recent cases in Brazil of microcephaly, a condition in which infants are born with abnormally small heads.

The disease is also thought to be linked to a form of temporary paralysis. Some in Brazil have suggested that the disease, which had its last outbreak in French Polynesia in 2013 and 2014, may have come to Brazil with international tourists during the 2014 World Cup.

Though Brazil’s northeast has been the epicenter of the crisis, the virus has also been diagnosed in numerous patients in Rio de Janeiro, which is in Brazil’s southeast.

While expressing sympathy for women and children suffering with cases of microcephaly, Rio public health officials said during a press conference Tuesday with the Rio 2016 organizing committee they believed the risk to contract the disease would be low when the sporting event opens in six months, during the relatively cool month of August. They also said city workers are already destroying mosquito-breeding grounds.

Athletes in Rio stay inside, lather on mosquito repellent as Zika virus spreads

João Grangeiro, the medical director of the Rio 2016 organizing committee, has said local authorities have not taken the decision to advise pregnant women to not come to the Games but will follow instructions from the World Health Organization should the international body issue that suggestion.

Some national teams have given their athletes instructions such as to sleep with the windows closed, said Grangeiro, but he said that the preventative measures to reduce breeding grounds for the mosquito would be the most important way to prevent contraction of the virus.

Asked about the location of the Olympic Park — a marshy region of waterways and lagoons of Rio straddling a neighborhood whose name, Jacarepaguá, is derived from the word referring to the zone’s native inhabitants, alligators — Daniel Soranz, Rio’s municipal health secretary, said the mosquito native to that area is the culex, not the Aedes aegypti.

Despite the international alarm over the virus, Mario Andrada, Rio 2016 spokesman, said the committee had “not received a single request to return tickets” to the events.