PARIS – In Beijing and Tokyo, it was the COVID plague. In Rio, it was the Zika virus. In Paris it’s the — SMACK — mosquitoes.
Which admittedly is not a huge vexation. Because, well, Paris. But annoying.
And, if too much heed is paid to the scientific experts — which we adamantly refuse to do — it can drive a person round the bend. The oracles of doom are all the time warning about this looming disaster and that looming disaster. OK, they were right about the coronavirus.
Yay, you. That’s a once-in-a-century phenomenon, maybe. But the sci-guys have been issuing alerts about dengue fever since months before the began, wringing their hands especially over what could happen when the Games got underway and some 15 million tourists descended on the capital, not to mention the many athletes from endemic dengue countries in Africa.
Why, there could be a dengue-fever super-spreader out there. In a city with hardly any air-conditioning, including my hotel room, it’s impossible to keep at arms length. Windows have to be flung open to get some air flowing.
And the pests have been particularly luxuriating in the hot, wet weather of these past few weeks. Dengue fever is spread by the African tiger mosquito, a bloodsucking bugger that buzzed and whined — you know the incoming sound — up into Europe at the turn of the millennium. It’s capable of transmitting five viruses: West Nile, chikungunya, Usutu, Zika and dengue.
Between January and April, France reported 1,679 imported dengue cases, 13 times more than the previous year, and that figure was expected to explode over the Olympics fortnight. The disease is transmitted thusly, as quoted by scientists from the Institut Pasteur: “When a female mosquito bites a virus carrier, she ingests viral particles. When the female mosquito bites another human, she injects the virus while taking her blood meal.
’’ The viral illness — also known as breakbone fever, due to the violent muscle spasms it causes in more serious cases — usually does little harm, a couple of weeks feeling lousy; fatigue, high fever, headaches, muscle aches. Worst case scenario: dengue hemorrhagic fever, bleeding from the nose and gums, vomiting blood. The only blood-gushing I’ve seen at these Games resulted from on the nose.
Health agencies have put “dengue detectives’’ on the case — checking for mosquito eggs (which can lie dormant for months) at 526 “nesting traps’’ deployed around Greater Paris, particularly hot-spotting the Stade de France, Olympic Village, certain “fan zones’’ where the Games-watching public gathers, and the city’s three airports. Judging by the media horde covering these Games — 26,000 journalists accredited for the Olympics and Paralympics — many of us seem to have been afflicted, rather, with African trypanosomiasis: Sleeping sickness. A vector-borne disease caused by the tsetse fly.
Starts with irritability, anxiety, fluctuating moods, progresses to reversal of the sleep/wake cycle, delirium and hallucinations. All around me, in the media workrooms, the media tribunes, the media lounges, the media buses, I see media mooks slumped over their laptops, sprawled open-mouthed and snoring on folding chairs, curled on the floor. It is Day 13 after all.
Everyone’s gassed. I also have mosquito bites all over my ankles from low-diving kamikaze attacks. Before the mosquitoes got down to business, France had already been bugging out over — bed bugs.
Toronto can empathize. But in Paris, the infestation was particularly acute on the public transit system, the vampiric parasites apparently finding comfortable lodgings in the vast Metro network. (From Paris, reportedly crossing the Channel to Britain aboard the Eurostar, or at least the Brits have blamed their recent bedbug crisis on the French.
But they blame everything on the French.) More of a freak-out for me are the rats. , the rats! Scuttling and scurrying everywhere, including across my toes one night as I walked home, long tail disappearing into a gutter.
They’re big and they’re menacing, nothing like the animated rodent in the 2007 film “Ratatouille.’’ Despite the handful of scandals and controversies of these Games as they unfolded, one pestilence that has been avoided is athletes using the podium as a pulpit because there’s something they want to get off their chest. Even with two major conflicts — Ukraine, Gaza — as a global backdrop to the Olympics, there’s been scarcely a peep of pontificating or proselytizing.
Funny how athletes speaking out feels admirable when I agree with their opinions — LeBron James on the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick, for instance, or Naomi Osaka on Black Lives Matter. Other times, I just want them to put a sock in it. Games organizers took a pre-emptive step in muzzling political speechifying by designating five areas where rhetoric was strictly forbidden: opening and closing ceremonies, medal ceremonies, during competition and in the Olympic Village.
Although they were allowed to preach and proclaim as they wished in the mixed zone, at press conferences and on social media, certain conditions still applied: no dissing any individual, organization or country. Also considered “disruptive behaviour’’ was “making comments during the presentation or anthem’’ of other athletes and displaying a flag or banner in those moments. Unless I missed it, there has been only one athlete here who seemed inclined to do any of that, a breakdancer on the Refugee Olympic Team who was reportedly reprimanded for a message of support toward Afghan women.
I’ve not heard a single Free Palestine! Columnists, though — never any shortage of sanctimonious twaddle from us, focused on the Olympics. Scratch-scratch. SMACK.
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