ICANN diverts from Puerto Rico to India to avoid Zika
ICANN has confirmed that its 57th public meeting will not be held, as originally planned, in Puerto Rico.
Instead, it is asking community members to instead head to Hyderabad, India, this November.
Those Las Vegas rumors turned out not to be true. However, on the up-side, those Las Vegas rumors turned out not to be true!
The decision was to relocate made to the a “state of emergency” being declared in Puerto Rico due to the Zika virus.
Zika is spread by mosquitoes and male sexual partners and can cause devastating birth defects in kids.
Latest figures from the US Center for Disease Control put infections in US territories at 701, three of whom were travelers.
ICANN said in a blog post this evening:
This decision was based on available research and information and the fact that Puerto Rico has declared a state of emergency due to the ongoing Zika virus outbreak. We believe that the Zika virus poses a significant enough threat that we need to postpone going to Puerto Rico for the health and safety of our community and our ICANN team, just as we had to postpone ICANN52 and relocate from Marrakech to Singapore due to the Ebola virus outbreak in 2014.
It’s the second of this year’s meetings to be relocated due to Zika. June’s Panama meeting has been moved to Helsinki.
ICANN said that the new venue for ICANN 57, which takes place from November 3 to 9 this year, is the Hyderabad International Convention Centre.
It’s said that ICANN will take a seven-figure hit to its bank balance in order to cancel the PR meeting.
Given that Zika can occur wherever dengue does, and India’s remarkable uptick in dengue cases in the last year; and given the additional vector of sexual transmission of Zika, then I guess we’ll all just hope there isn’t a huge international gathering of some sort in Brazil this summer ahead of the ICANN meeting in November.
Or if such a huge gathering occurs, no large number of people from India go there.
BTW, if it was to pick another country with dengue outbreaks, Singapore would have done…
I completely agree with you. Its good to have the public meeting somewhere in Singapore or some other countries in South East Asia. Singapore is going to be the first option or Thailand or Hong Kong. If it’s something related to tech I would prefer these three countries.