The UN health agency is changing its advice to travelers returning from areas facing a Zika virus outbreak, saying both men and women should now practice safe sex or abstinence for six months. World Health Organization said more new evidence comes to light, its guidelines will be reviewed and recommendations will be updated.
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Hepatitis C virus, a related virus, can infect the human cornea and is transmitted by corneal transplants, the study said.
Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered that the Zika virus is able to live on the eyes.
To determine the effects of Zika on the eye, the team infected adult mice with mosquitoes under the skin – similar to the way humans are infected by mosquitoes.
The mosquito that transmits the virus is not found in the United Kingdom so risk to the wider British public is deemed to be “negligible” by health leaders.
The good news is that top scientists think even if human tears do not turn out to be infectious, their detection of live virus in the eye and viral RNA in tears will have practical benefits.
The work has come about as Zika researchers are confounded by the rate at which the virus is spreading, which appears to be more quickly than by mosquito-borne transmission alone.
According to experts, once a person has been infected, he or she is likely to be protected from future infections.
“I think what this highlights really is how much we don’t know about Zika virus, that they err on the side of caution”, Potter said.
The administration said all global travel healthcare centres would provide “free Zika screening and tests” to all individuals travelling from countries where local Zika transmission had been confirmed.
Zika infections have also been linked to a rare neurological syndrome known as Guillain-Barre, as well as other neurological disorders.
Further, the infection in the eyes also raises the possibility that people could acquire Zika infection through contact with tears from infected people.
Zika causes only mild symptoms such as fever and a rash for most people but pregnant women who catch it can give birth to babies with microcephaly, a deformation marked by abnormally small brains and heads. Tears from the mice contained genetic material from Zika, but were not infectious a month later.
The research appears in the journal Cell Reports.
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Researchers believe that the study could shed light on why some infected people develop these eye diseases.
