Rio confident of Zika measures

Rio officials confident of measures in place against Zika

Nawal El Moutawakel (2nd L), chairman of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Coordination Commission, gestures, accompanied by Rio 2016 Olympic Games Organising Committee President Carlos Arthur Nuzman (2nd R) and Rio 2016 Committee Chief Executive Officer Sidney Levy (R), after a news conference during the IOC Coordination Commission's 10th visit to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 13, 2016


RIO DE JANEIRO - Rio de Janeiro Olympic officials are confident that measures in place will protect visitors from the Zika virus when the games open in less than four months.

The focus on Zika returned to the Olympics after United States health officials said enough evidence exists to say the virus causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads.

''We'll continue to follow the advice and guidance of the World Health Organization to the letter,'' Rio spokesman Mario Andrada said on Thursday. ''And we'll continue to keep our partners informed, including the national Olympic committees and the international federations, about information regarding the Zika issue.''

The confirmation by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came just hours after a team of Olympic inspectors completed their last visit to Rio.

Nawal El Moutawakel, the head of the inspection team, did not get a single question about Zika in a 45-minute news conference.

Rio officials say stagnant water is being drained around venues. Air conditioning will be installed in the athletes' village, and visitors will be encouraged to use repellent, and wear long sleeves and trousers.

Officials are hopeful the cooler, drier weather when the games open will reduce the mosquito population.

Brazil is at the center of the outbreak, with Rio de Janeiro getting special attention with 10,500 athletes and up to 500,000 foreign tourists expected for South America's first games.

A top official at the CDC said ''there is no longer any doubt that Zika causes microcephaly.''


The CDC said the virus was spread primarily though mosquito bites, but also can be transmitted through sex, and was particularly worrisome for pregnant women.

Reach out for the sun

Avoiding Sun as Dangerous as Smoking

Nonsmokers who stayed out of the sun had a life expectancy similar to smokers who soaked up the most rays, according to researchers who studied nearly 30,000 Swedish women over 20 years.

This indicates that avoiding the sun "is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking," write the authors of the article, published March 21 in the Journal of Internal Medicine. Compared with those with the highest sun exposure, life expectancy for those who avoided sun dropped by 0.6 to 2.1 years.

Pelle Lindqvist, MD, of Karolinska University Hospital in Huddinge, Sweden, and colleagues found that women who seek out the sun were generally at lower risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and noncancer/non-CVD diseases such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and pulmonary diseases, than those who avoided sun exposure.

And one of the strengths of the study was that results were dose-specific — sunshine benefits went up with amount of exposure.

The researchers acknowledge that longer life expectancy for sunbathers seems paradoxical to the common thinking that sun exposure increases risk for skin cancer.

"We did find an increased risk of...skin cancer. However, the skin cancers that occurred in those exposing themselves to the sun had better prognosis," Dr Lindqvist said.

Some Daily Exposure Important for Health

Given these findings, he told Medscape Medical News, women should not overexpose themselves to sun, but underexposure may be even more dangerous than people think.

"We know in our population, there are three big lifestyle factors [that endanger health]: smoking, being overweight, and inactivity," he said. "Now we know there is a fourth — avoiding sun exposure."

Sweden's restrictive guidance against sun exposure over the past 4 decades may be particularly ill-advised, the study finds, in a country where the maximum UV index is low (< 3) for up to 9 months out of the year.

Use of sunscreen is also widely misunderstood in the country and elsewhere, Dr Lindqvist said.

"If you're using it to be out longer in the sun, you're using it in the wrong manner," he said. However, "If you are stuck on a boat and have to be out, it's probably better to have sunscreen than not to have it."

Women with more pigmentation would be particularly well-served to stop avoiding sunshine, he said, adding that many people in India, for instance, follow guidelines like those in Sweden to avoid sun year round.

And because melanomas are rare among women with darker skin, benefit goes up in those populations when weighing sun exposure's risk against benefits, Dr Lindqvist said.

Age and Smoking Habits

The researchers studied sun exposure as a risk factor for all-cause mortality for 29,518 women with no history of malignancy in a prospective 20-year follow-up of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort.

The women were recruited from 1990 to 1992 when they were 25 to 64 years old. Detailed information was available at baseline on sun-exposure habits and potential confounders such as marital status, education level, smoking, alcohol consumption, and number of births.

When smoking was factored in, even smokers at approximately 60 years of age with the most active sun-exposure habits had a 2-year longer life expectancy during the study period compared with smokers who avoided sun exposure, the researchers note.

The authors do, however, acknowledge some major limitations. Among them, it was impossible to differentiate between active sun-exposure habits and a healthy lifestyle, and they did not have access to exercise data.

Role of Vitamin D Still in Question

The results add to the longstanding debate on the role of vitamin D in health and the amount of it people need, but this study doesn't resolve the question.

"Whether the positive effect of sun exposure demonstrated in this observational study is mediated by vitamin D, another mechanism related to ultraviolet radiation, or by unmeasured bias cannot be determined. Therefore, additional research is warranted," the authors write.

"From Irish studies we know that vitamin D deficiency makes melanomas more malignant," Dr Lindqvist said.

"This is in agreement with our results; melanomas of [those not exposed] to the sun had a worse prognosis."

This study was supported by the Clintec at the Karolinska Institute; ALF (Faculty of Medicine, Lund University, Region Skane); the Swedish Cancer Society; and the Swedish Medical Research Council. Funding was also received from Lund University Hospital; the Gustav V Jubilee Fund; the Gunnar Nilsson Foundation; the Kamprad Foundation; and the European Research Council. The authors declared no relevant financial relationships.

Sharapova Olympic-bound

Russia says Sharapova in Olympic plans despite doping case

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia says Maria Sharapova is still in its plans for the Olympic tennis tournament in August despite her provisional suspension for failing a drug test.

Sharapova has been suspended since last month, when she admitted she tested positive for the banned substance meldonium at January's Australian Open.

Sharapova said she had been taking meldonium for medical reasons for 10 years and had not seen a World Anti-Doping Agency ruling last year that it would be banned for 2016.

Russian Tennis Federation president Shamil Tarpishchev says in a statement ''we really hope that Sharapova will still be allowed to take part in the Olympic Games.''

No date has been announced by the International Tennis Federation for a hearing into the case of Sharapova, who won Olympic silver in 2012.

US women want equal pay or else

US women raise prospect of Olympic boycott

Los Angeles (AFP) - The United States women's football team could boycott the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro if demands to be paid the same as their male counterparts are not met, World Cup winner c said.

Sauerbrunn, a member of the USA team that lifted the World Cup in Canada last year and a gold medal-winning veteran of the 2012 Olympics, told ESPN that players would not rule out the possibility of a boycott.

The 30-year-old defender said a boycott would be discussed by the team if they believed no progress on the increasingly acrimonious dispute had been made.

"It would still be on the table," Sauerbrunn said. "We are reserving every right to do so and we're leaving every avenue open. And if nothing has changed, if we don't feel real progress has been made, then that's a conversation that we're going to have."

Sauerbrunn is one of five members of the US team who have filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the US Soccer Federation alleging wage discrimination.

High-profile stars such as World Cup Most Valuable Player Carli Lloyd, Megan Rapinoe, Hope Solo and Alex Morgan are the other signatories to the complaint, which was filed with support from the rest of the squad, Sauerbrunn said.

Sauerbrunn said she hoped the legal action would lead to "equal pay for equal play."

"I think, compensation-wise, respect-wise, that's what I'm really hoping comes out of this complaint," she told ESPN.

"I hope that it puts enough pressure on the federation to show them our worth, our value."

The US women earned $2 million in prize money for winning last year's World Cup, which the federation distributed to the women and the organization.

The men's team received $9 million after losing in the round of 16 at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

"The message they've been putting out by paying us drastically less than the men is that they don't value our contributions to the game as much as the men," Sauerbrunn told ESPN.

Opponents of the women players' complaint justify the disparity by asserting that the men's game generates more revenue than the female game.

However the US women are also pointing to other areas such as the quality and type of pitches used for their fixtures as evidence of discrimination.

For last year's "victory tour" following the World Cup, eight out of 10 games took place on artificial turf.

"The men never played in any friendlies on (artificial) turf so why are we playing eight out of 10 on turf when we just won a World Cup?" Sauerbrunn said.

"You'd think they'd want to present us on these beautiful sparkling pitches. It was mind-boggling to me that they would make us play on (artificial) turf on eight out of 10 games in our victory tour."

London new North Pole

Why the North Pole is now slowly moving towards London

London is calling. The planet’s North Pole mysteriously changed the direction of its travel in 2000, turning eastwards towards the Greenwich meridian. It now seems that this change in direction is down to the redistribution of water on land as well as to melting polar ice.

The Earth’s rotational axis, and with it the location of the physical North Pole, was travelling at a rate of about 10 centimetres a year over the last century towards Canada’s Hudson Bay along a line of longitude that runs through Toronto and Panama City.

This movement was down to the redistribution of Earth’s mass as the crust has slowly rebounded after the end of the last ice age.

But since 2000 it has made a dramatic 75-degree eastward shift heading along the Greenwich meridian. Some evidence suggested that the shrinking of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica caused by climate change was behind the surprise shift.

Now, a study says this change is also influenced by the changing distribution of water on land.

“This is the first time we have solid evidence that changes in land water distribution on a global scale also shift which direction the axis moves to,” says lead researcher Surendra Adhikari of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

For example, Adhikari says, the Indian subcontinent and the Caspian Sea are losing a massive amount of water, pulling the axis eastwards.
Always on the move

The study used data from NASA’s GRACE satellites to investigate how the distribution of water mass was related to the direction of Earth’s axis movement between 2002 and 2015.

The results also shed light on another long-standing puzzle: why the axis oscillates every few years. This oscillation is also down to changes in water mass around the planet, says Adhikari.

“The precise knowledge of polar motion, and Earth rotation in general, is indispensable for many applications,” says Florian Seitz of the German Geodetic Research Institute in Munich. This includes GPS navigation systems and the positioning of satellites. The findings could also help us study climate change, he says.

Because we have an accurate record of the axis’s movement since 1899, we may now be able to use that data to map out past changes in the distribution of land water more precisely.

This, in conjunction with factoring in where the axis is heading, could help make climate models more accurate.

Ja-born Olympians representing other countries

Bridge, Decasseres two Jamaican-born shooters representing the West Indies Federation

Jamaican-born athletes have represented several countries at the Olympic Games —  Canada, Bahamas, Great Britain, United States, and the Cayman Islands.
One of the first and oldest to do so was Keith De Casseres, representing the West Indies Federation in shooting at the 1960 Olympic Games.
The 5-10 Decasseres, born on May 27, 1910, took his place in the men's free pistol, 50 metres. He was 50-years-old and one of 67 men competing in the event.
Decasseres was one of just eight men 50 years and older taking part in the competition, none of whom got on to the podium. The closest oldster coming close to winning a medal was 52-year-old Swede and multiple world champion Tornsten Ulman who shot 550 points for fourth place.
In fact Decasseres was the only competitor who failed to finish the 50m free pistol at that Games.
Another Jamaican-born shooter, Tony Bridge, also representing the West Indies Federation, tied in 60th place in the same event, after shooting 319 points. Bridge was 39 years old at the time.
Decasseres died in 2003, three years after Bridge.
Bridge, however, was the leading pistol shooter in the region, competing in both the 1960 and 1964 Games (for Jamaica), before becoming a leading sports administrator.
A Wolmerian, Bridge graduated from high school in 1938 and became chairman and managing director of Novelty Trading Company. He was director of insurance, banking and other commercial companies in Jamaica.
Bridge, however, was by far one of the most sought-after sports administrators in Jamaica and he made himself available, heading the top sports associations in the land.
He was president of the Jamaica Olympic Association from 1958 to 1977, president of the Jamaica Amateur Athletic Association (JAAA) from 1954 to 1962, and vice-president of the Jamaica Boxing Board of Control from 1947 to 1962.
Bridge was also vice-president of Jamaica Rifle Association (1960-62), Jamaica Amateur Weightlifting Association (1939-49), vice-chairman of the Organising Committee for the 1962 Central American and Caribbean Games, and the 1966 British Commonwealth Games.
Both the 1962 CAC Games and 1966 Commonwealth Games were held in Kingston, Jamaica.
An IOC member in October 1973, Bridge served until his death in December 2000.
He was a member of the Commission for the Olympic Programme from 1974-80 and a member of the Press Commission since 1983.

IAAF tests come too late

WADA says doping cases from 2005 worlds are past time limit

In this Tuesday, July 26, 2005 file photo Russian Tatyana Andrianova crosses the finish line to win the DN Galan 800m event in Stockholm. 

 

Numerous doping cases in track and field may go unpunished because the sport's governing body tested samples after their time limit had expired.

In at least one case, a Russian runner could be allowed to keep her world championship medal even though she tested positive for a banned substance.
The World Anti-Doping Agency said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that the IAAF wrongly interpreted a rule change in April 2015 when it decided to retest samples from the 2005 and 2007 world championships. Testers found 28 athletes had tested positive at both championships, but only the samples from 2005 missed the deadline.
The IAAF believed it was able to retest the 2005 samples because the statute of limitations in the WADA code had increased to 10 years in 2015, but WADA said the previous eight-year limit should have been used.
"If the previous eight-year statute of limitations has expired prior to 1 January 2015, it does not extend to 10 years under the 2015 code," WADA spokesman Ben Nichols told the AP.
The IAAF has been under pressure to clean up the sport since a WADA commission report detailed state-supported doping in Russian track and field. The country's track team has since been banned from competition and could miss this year's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Doping samples from the 2005 worlds in Helsinki stopped being eligible for retesting in 2013, well before the IAAF began its latest round of checks in April 2015.
One athlete who could benefit from the decision is Russian runner Tatyana Andrianova. She was banned by the IAAF in December after the steroid stanozolol was found in a sample from the day she won bronze in the 800 meters at the 2005 worlds. She has already appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Another athlete linked to the retests is Russian hammer thrower Tatyana Beloborodova, who won silver at the 2005 worlds and gold at the 2012 London Olympics. The IAAF confirmed Monday she has been provisionally suspended but refused to comment on reports in Russian state media that this was because of a retested sample from 2005.
Doping cases from the 2007 world championships and earlier retesting of 2005 samples that the IAAF performed in 2013, catching five medal winners, are within the deadline.
"As to the 2005 world championship retests, there is currently an ongoing case before the Court of Arbitration for Sport concerning an appeal by one of the athletes concerned, Tatyana Andrianova," the IAAF said in an e-mailed statement. "The IAAF will not be commenting further until the conclusion of that case."