Nobody’s panicking. Not even the people who think it’s dumb to stage a massive tourist event in the middle of a Public Health Emergency.
? Being pregnant doesn’t mean you’re sick ?. Women can and do continue to live life just like usual while pregnant. The idea that a pregnant woman ‘needs to take it easy’ was debunked years ago. It’s not like your uterus just falls out when you run or pick heavy objects up.
I didn’t mean the competitors. I meant the people coming to watch the events. I can’t believe that all that many pregnant women are/were planning to come watch. Of course they should stay home now, but that won’t affect it much. They can hand out complimentary packets of condoms to all of the male attendees.
I’m still not grokking. Why *wouldn’t women who are pregnant plan on attending the Olympics? It’s kind of a big deal, and it only happens every few years, and if this is one of the years you can afford to go, why wouldn’t you go even if you got pregnant? Mathematically, almost 5% of the world’s female human population is pregnant at any time. There are lots of women who attend the Olympics, the majority of them at a fertile age. It would be extraordinary if some of them weren’t pregnant.
*I mean, I wouldn’t go NOW, whatwith the zika thing, but that seems to be arguing in circles…
Calling off the Olympics would be a massive overreaction. Putting in health measures would be necessary, but calling off an entire event?
What sort of health measures are you proposing to stop a sexually transmitted virus that causes Guillon Barre and microencephally?
Keep in mind that, per the OP article - current efforts at stopping mosquito transmission are failing miserably.
Here’s another quote, from Amir Attaran’s article in the Harvard Public Health Review, with citations, explaining the situation in more detail.
http://harvardpublichealthreview.org/off-the-podium-why-rios-2016-olympic-games-must-not-proceed
Quarantining a country the size of Brazil would be an overreaction. Cancelling or postponing the Olympics - an entirely unnecessary entertainment and tourist event - is not.
massive over-reaction. Are people dropping dead? No. Does every single pregnant woman exposed produce a defective child? No. In fact, birth defects in response to this virus are rare, and if a woman knows she was exposed she can choose to abort. Except of course not in countries controlled by religious fruitcakes.
It’s a stupid fuss about nothing.
No, no…I’m not grokking why you think pregnant women don’t go to the Olympics.
And if your rubric for public health is that “every single” case of exposure results in an adverse event, you’ve got a very different rubric than most of the public, and certainly than public health officials. Thalidomide doesn’t cause deformities in every single case either, but the world pretty unanimously decided it was a bad idea to give it to pregnant women.
Although, all that being said, my concerns are less, not none, but less, about pregnant women than about the massive amount of paid sex work that happens during the Olympics, and men bring zika home to areas where it doesn’t currently exist and spreading it there. I know the failure rate of condoms for preventing pregnancy; they can’t be any more effective at preventing zika transmission.
But it was your oddly confident assertion that pregnant women don’t go to the Olympics that got my attention enough to bother posting.
Here are some other options. List includes “fembots”, “ferrets”, “faucets”, “fewmets”, “foxnuts” and “fylfots” (and indeed “fuckits”).
You left out “Foxnews”.
The part I don’t understand is why athletes don’t count.
That too. I’d be prepared to accept a chain of thought that goes, these women have been training for this for years, they’re probably using contraception to avoid derailing their athletic careers with a poorly timed pregnancy, and besides that many of them have extremely low body fat, suppressing ovulation, and therefore very few Olympic athletes are pregnant during the games…making the few isolated cases we know of all or most of the women who have competed while pregnant. But even if few in number, I don’t know why they shouldn’t “count”.
Okay, suppose few if any pregnant females travel from any non-Brazil place to Brazil for the Olympics – both participants and spectators.
But how many foreign (non-Brazilian) non-pregnant persons will travel to Brazil and then be ex-non-pregnant when they return home?
Hopefully none if they listened to the warnings and took lots of precautions.
That would have to be “Foxnewts”, but that sort of works.
Yes, hopefully none. But not probably. More likely, lots of people will, one way or another, carry La Zika home with them to the four (or is it seven?) corners of the world.