A CDC emergency response team is in Utah at the request of the Utah Department of Health. That helped make this case highly unusual, said officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC officials are helping Utah experts investigate the case.
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As of July 13, 1,306 cases of Zika have been reported in the continental US and Hawaii, none of which have been the result of local spread by mosquitoes. To date, the 12 cases confirmed in our state are associated with travel to a country or region with ongoing Zika virus transmission.
Angela Dunn, deputy state epidemiologist at the Utah Department of Health, reportedly said, “Based on what we know so far about this case, there is no evidence that there is any risk of Zika virus transmission among the general public in Utah”. The CDC said the deceased person had virus levels in their blood that were more than 100,000 times higher than amounts seen in other people with Zika infections.
Zika virus is usually spread through mosquito bites (from Aedes aegypti mosquitoes) or through sexual transmission, but in this case neither of those appear to have been involved.
That man was the first person with Zika to die in the continental US and his case was notable for the extremely high levels of the virus found in his blood – more than 100,000 times the level of people infected with the disease, according to the CDC.
Frieden said that the continental USA now has more than 1,300 cases of Zika caused by travel, and if this type of transmission was not rare, “it’s likely that we would have seen this before”. “There is uncertainty about how this new case contracted Zika”. In 14 cases, transmission was by sexual contact with an individual who was infected outside the country.
In recent months, researchers have learned that Zika virus lingers in blood, semen, saliva, urine and breast milk and could, in principle, be transmitted through any of those fluids. The exact cause of his death has not been determined.
The virus can cause devastating birth defects like blindness and microcephaly, and there was a case reported just last week of a woman passing it onto a man she had sex with in NY. The elderly man died in June – although it’s not yet clear if Zika contributed to his death.
The tropical virus rarely spreads from person to person, not like the flu or the measles.
Varieties of mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus are not native to Utah. The patient has recovered. People primarily get it from the bite of an infected Aedes species mosquito.
Florida has the second highest number of Zika infections in the continental United States, second only to NY, according to the CDC.
The caregiver was briefly ill, but has since recovered, authorities say, and caution that this was likely an isolated case and should not be cause for alarm.
“This raises some interesting questions”, said infectious disease specialist William Schaffner from Tennessee.
There are 2,916 documented cases of Zika virus in US territories, the vast majority of which were acquired locally.
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Officials are interviewing and testing all the health-care workers who could have come into contact with the elderly man.
