New York City’s health department on Friday reported the first documented case of sexual transmission of Zika from a woman to her male partner, raising new concerns about the spread of the virus, which is typically contracted through mosquito bites.
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The caregiver has since recovered from the infection, which is primarily transmitted by mosquitoes but can also be passed on through sexual contact.
Tom Hudachko, from the Utah Department of Health, said state officials were not aware of any mosquitoes known to carry the Zika virus within Utah.
Federal health officials are trying to figure out how a person in Utah, who cared for a patient who died after contracting Zika, also became infected.
Lab tests showed he had uniquely high amounts of the virus – more than 100,000 times higher than seen in other samples from infected people – in his blood. The caregiver had not traveled to a Zika-affected area or had sex with an infected person, Staples said. He had been taking care of an older man who had contacted Zika after traveling, and who died in June.
The ability of Zika to spread through sex could help it gain a foothold outside of the tropical climates that are home to the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries Zika as well as dengue, chikungunya and Yellow Fever.
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. After his death, the man has apparently achieved another first, being possibly the first person to infect someone else through nonsexual contact. Though the virus can live in urine, blood, and saliva-in addition to semen and vaginal fluid-there were previously no cases of it being spread in those ways.
Cases of Zika are usually mild and rarely result in death. “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”. And it tells us that we still have a lot more to learn about Zika. But during recent outbreaks in Latin America, scientists discovered that infection during pregnancy has led to severe brain-related birth defects.
More than 1,300 Zika illnesses have been reported in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, including eight in Utah, according to health officials.
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The CDC has also been tracking pregnant women infected with Zika, and says they have five reports of pregnancy losses because of miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion. Nearly all were people who had traveled to Zika outbreak countries and caught the virus there.
