May 12, 2016 4 min read

Major League Baseball recently took the prudent step of relocating two games between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Miami Marlins that were scheduled to be played in Puerto Rico because of risks associated with the Zika virus.

Certainly, it’s possible that someone could be infected when the games are played in Miami, but the likelihood would have been much greater in San Juan, where there have been nearly 700 cases of the disease, which is linked to development of Guillain-Barre syndrome, other neurological problems in children and adults, and, most concerning, microcephaly in babies born to women who were infected during pregnancy.

The number of Zika cases is much, much higher in Brazil, which is the epicenter of the disease’s outbreak in the Americas, and a public health expert in Canada issued a very persuasive call for the Olympics scheduled in Rio de Janeiro this summer to be postponed or moved elsewhere.

Amir Attaran, a member of both the law and medicine faculties at University of Ottawa, laid out his arguments in a piece published by Harvard Public Health Review.

Attaran’s commentary cites five reasons, quoted here, that the Olympics must not be held in Brazil:

1. Rio de Janeiro’s suspected Zika cases are the highest of any state in Brazil (26,000), and its Zika incidence rate is the fourth worst (157 per 100,000). Attaran said Rio is “not on the fringes of the outbreak, but inside its heart.”

2.Although Zika was discovered nearly 70 years ago, the viral strain that recently entered Brazil is clearly new, different and vastly more dangerous than “old” Zika.

3. While Brazil’s Zika will spread globally – given enough time, viruses always do – it helps nobody to speed that up. In particular, it cannot possibly help when an estimated 500,000 foreign tourists flock into Rio for the games, potentially becoming infected, and returning to their homes where both local Aedes mosquitoes and sexual transmission can establish new outbreaks.

4. When (not if) the Games speed up Zika’s spread, the already-urgent job of inventing new technologies to stop it becomes harder. … By spreading the virus faster and farther, the Games steal away the very thing – time – that scientists and public health profressionals need to build defenses (such as vaccines and antiviral drugs).

5. Proceeding with the Games violates what the Olympics stand for. The International Olympic Committee writes “Olympism seeks to create … social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.” But how socially responsible or ethical is it to spread disease? Sports fans who are wealthy enough to visit Rio’s Games choose Zika’s risks for themselves, but when some of them return home infected, their fellow citizens bear the risk, too.

In an interview Monday with The Canadian Press, Attaran said, “The problem is we’re essentially faced with a situation of games versus health. And to me, it’s very clear that you don’t play games so as to wreck the health of the world, which is very possibly the outcome.”

We have no doubt Brazil, the International Olympic Committee and world health officials will do everything within their power to make the Games as safe as possible, but they can do only so much.

As Attaran notes, Brazil’s massive outbreak likely resulted from a single viral introduction sometime in mid to late 2013.

In conclusion, Attaran wrote, “None of this is to deny that the Games are a much-loved event.

But where is the love for the possible victims of a foreseeable global catastrophe: the damaged or dead adults, and the babies for whom – and mark these coldly clinical words carefully – fetal brain disruption sequence is as terrible as it sounds, and extinguishes the hope of a normal life even before it has begun? With stakes like that, bluntly put, these Olympics are no game at all.”

Who could possibly find fault with these arguments? Probably just people who stand to make a lot of money from the Olympics.