Meanwhile, U.S. health officials said men who have visited an area with Zika should use condoms if they have sex with a pregnant woman – for the entire duration of the pregnancy.
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With the number of reported cases on the rise, the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center Laboratories in Albany will begin to provide free Zika virus testing for all pregnant women who traveled to an area with ongoing Zika virus transmission during pregnancy.
The CDC also said that women who aren’t pregnant, but who are concerned about contracting the virus through sex could consider using condoms during sex or abstaining if their partner has traveled to an area with Zika cases.
Sexual transmission became a hot issue this week, when health officials said a person in Texas – who had not traveled to an outbreak area – was infected through sex. As more travel-related cases are being diagnosed (35 cases) in patients in the United States, the CDC is issuing new guidelines for healthcare providers and how to prevent the virus from being transmitted via sex. The new guidance recommends that not only pregnant women who have symptoms of Zika should be tested but pregnant women without symptoms who have traveled to places where Zika is spreading should also be offered testing. It remains present in blood for only a week.
There is no vaccine to prevent, or medicine to treat, Zika infections. However, he said that more information is needed on those findings, including the methodology behind them, and the recent guidelines do not address kissing. Their advice is based on three cases of sexual transmission of the virus.
As Zika’s impact continues to grow, health officials are still struggling to answer basic questions about how the virus works.
Although sexual transmission of the virus is possible, mosquito bites are still the primary way Zika is transmitted.
He urged pregnant women to take special precautions, stressing both the seriousness of the discovery and the reality that it was too soon to say how it could impact on the epidemic. “Presence of virus in saliva doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily transmissible that way”. Their child may come out with an abnormally small head and other defects.
Colombia has reported more than 20,000 Zika cases.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says it’s not clear whether Zika virus can spread through saliva. While researchers have not definitively determined that Zika is causing this birth defect, WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan called the possible link “an extraordinary event and a public health threat to other parts of the world”.
