The head of the World Health Organization's emergency committee said that postponing the Rio Olympics due to fears that the event could speed the spread of the zika virus would give a "false" sense of security "because travelers are constantly going in and out of Brazil." Britain's Health Protection Agency Chair David Heymann, who also leads the WHO panel of independent experts on zika, said that extensive travel in a globalized world "is the issue, not the Games that start on August 5." He said, "People go in and out of Brazil all the time for holiday, for business, for whatever. And the Olympics is much less travel, it would be one-time travel. It's actually in the winter months when hopefully transmission (of the virus) is less. So it's just a false security to say that you'll postpone the Olympics and postpone the globalization of this disease" (REUTERS, 5/30).
Organizers of the 2016 Paralympic Games "are giving away half a million tickets 100 days before the start of competition in a bid to boost support for September's events." Sales have lagged and Rio de Janeiro said that "it was buying 500,000 tickets to give to city employees, students and the handicapped." Before the announcement, only 720,000 out of the total 3.3 million tickets "had been sold" (REUTERS, 5/30).
