I’ve been saying for almost a year now that the Olympics being in Rio is a horrible idea. On top of the whole Zika thing and drug lords ruling over the only highway in the city, it just in general does not sound to be a safe or well-planned event. Oh yeah, and now there’s apparently a bacteria that’s immune to drugs living in the water.
Via CNN:
“A group of Brazilian scientists have detected a drug-resistant bacteria growing off of some of Rio de Janeiro’s most stunning beaches, one month before the city is due to host the 2016 Olympic Games. According to lead researcher Renata Picao, the “super bacteria” entered the city’s waterways when sewage coming from local hospitals got channeled into the bay.
“We have been looking for ‘super bacteria’ in coastal waters during a one-year period in five beaches,” Picao told CNN during a visit to her lab.
“We found that the threats occur in coastal waters in a variety of concentrations and that they are strongly associated with pollution.” The news comes as Rio prepares to host hundreds of thousands of athletes and tourists during next month’s Summer Olympics. Among the beaches flagged were Flamengo and Botafogo, which border the bay where Olympic sailors are scheduled to compete.
Nice. A year of studying that ends right as the country is about to be flooded with roughly 500,000 guests from other countries. Really good planning. Especially since your findings conclude that there is in fact something living in the water that is a result of all the sewage. Which I probably could have told you. I don’t know much about science, but I do know that a lot of really dangerous things grow in rotten, wet human waste.
“It’s a nice sailing area but every time you get some water in your face, it feels like there’s some alien enemy entering your face,” German Paralympic sailor Heiko Kroger said during a recent visit to Rio. “I keep my nose and my lips closed.”
Kroger believes the super bacteria may have caused a severe skin infection in one of his teammates during recent training. Picao believes the city’s “fragile” sanitation infrastructure is responsible for the presence of the super bacteria. “This bacteria colonizes the intestine and it goes along with feces to the hospital sewage,” Picao said. “We believe that hospital sewage goes into municipal sewage and gets to the Guanabara Bay or to other rivers and finally gets to the beach.”
Ok, what? What is this stuff? Is it like some sort of alien bacteria that burrows into your skin upon contact? That literally sounds like something from a monster movie. How can you expect people to come to your country and be safe if the fucking water is trying to eat you? How does that make any sense? (Also, I’d like everyone to take a moment and appreciate that I controlled myself enough to put the phrase ‘H2O-h N0!’ in the title). Listen, I’m no genius, but I do fancy myself pretty level-headed. And I feel that any country where the water tries to eat your flesh is probably not a safe place to be sending athletes.