Experts Study Risks of Zika Virus Spreading at Rio Olympics

RIO DE JANEIRO: With about 500,000 people expected to visit Brazil for the Olympics here this year, researchers are scrambling to figure how much of a risk the Games might pose in spreading the Zika virus around the world.

Infectious disease specialists are particularly focused on the potential for Zika to spread to the United States. As many as 200,000 Americans are expected to travel to Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics in August. When they return to the Northern Hemisphere and its summer heat, far more mosquitoes will be around to potentially transmit the virus in the United States.

Brazilian researchers say they believe that Zika, which has been linked to severe birth defects, came to their country during another major sports event – the 2014 World Cup – when hundreds of thousands of visitors flowed into Brazil. Virus trackers here say that the strain raging in Brazil probably came from Polynesia, where an outbreak was rattling small islands around the Pacific.

As many as 1.5 million people are believed to have contracted the virus in Brazil since then, and the authorities are now investigating thousands of reported cases of babies being born recently with brain damage and abnormally small heads. Zika has spread to more than 20 nations and territories in the Western Hemisphere, according to the World Health Organization, illustrating how quickly the epidemic can expand even without a big international gathering.

By itself, the virus is not normally life-threatening, and most people who become infected have no symptoms at all.

U.S. officials said Thursday that there was little likelihood of a Zika outbreak in the United States, adding that the country’s long history of mosquito control efforts had curbed other mosquito-borne diseases, like dengue or chikungunya, in the past.

But because the virus can be carried in a person’s blood to a new country, then passed to others by mosquito bites, researchers are trying to determine whether a big global event like the Olympics could add to the global transmission of the disease.

Brazil has been one of the hardest-hit countries and the authorities are under intense pressure domestically to contain the Zika epidemic right away, regardless of the Olympics.

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Source:Ndtv