The World Health Organization has once again issued a list of ways to avoid Zika virus while travelling to Rio de Janeiro, after a Canadian professor launched a campaign calling for the Summer Olympic Games to be relocated from Brazil.

Amir Attaran, a law professor and health policy expert at the University of Ottawa, published an explosive commentary in Harvard Public Health Review earlier this week, stating that the Games’ events should be divided up among cities like London, Beijing, Athens and Sydney.

Attaran writes that an estimated half-million visitors going to the centre of the Zika crisis will certainly mean avoidable cases of microcephaly -- babies born with malformed brains – in other countries.

He points out there have been an estimated 7,000 cases of microcephaly in Brazil already, and that the incidence of the disease is higher in Rio than anywhere else in the country.

Although Zika is most commonly transmitted to humans by a species of mosquitoes that do not exist in Canada, there has been at least one sexually-transmitted case here.

“I love the Olympics. I’m an athlete. My family is Brazilian,” Attaran told CTV News on Thursday. “I’m saying this because I don’t want to see a global pandemic of children born with half brains.”

“I’m putting forward a position that is widely held by the public health community,” Attaran added.

However, International Olympic Committee medical director Dr. Richard Budgett told The Associated Press Wednesday that the Olympics will go ahead as planned, under advice from the WHO.

Dr. Budgett cited “clear statements from WHO that there should be no restrictions on travel and trade means there is no justification for canceling or delaying or postponing or moving the Rio Games,” and said the situation is expected to improve in the next three months.

The WHO, meanwhile, said Thursday that visitors should follow guidelines, including wearing insect repellant, consulting a health care provider before travelling, and abstaining from sex or practicing safer sex for four weeks after returning from Brazil. Those are the same guidelines the WHO has issued for travel to other Zika-affected parts of the world.

The WHO also recommended avoiding “impoverished and over-crowded areas in cities and towns with no piped water and poor sanitation” – something Attaran said is simply not possible.

Doctor calls paper ‘BS’

CTV News Infectious Diseases Expert Dr. Neil Rau sides with the IOC and WHO.

“(Attaran) has gone out on a limb with a recommendation that in my opinion is BS,” he said.

Dr. Rau added that Zika virus is “relatively mild except in a small group of people” and that in a globalized world, “we already know the virus is spreading like wildfire.”

“It is a hugely disruptive decision to cancel a huge worldwide event,” he said, “when you’re dealing with a disease that’s not really that dangerous.”

With a report from CTV’s medical specialist Avis Favaro and producer Elizabeth St. Philip