Health officials are stumped after a Utah caregiver became infected with the Zika virus after caring for an elderly patient who has the disease.
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Gary Edwards, executive director, Salt Lake County Health Department, speaks during a news conference Monday, July 18, 2016, in Salt Lake City.
Local health officials are working with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on an investigation.
CDC investigators dispatched to Utah to get to the bottom of the unexplained transmission will test other people who came in contact with the index patient for infection.
As of July 13, no cases of locally transmitted, mosquito-borne Zika have been reported in the continental United States.
Health officials stressed to reporters in a press briefing that mosquitoes remain the main way that Zika spreads. The virus is found in the bodily fluids of people infected with it, such as in blood, semen, saliva, breast milk, and urine, but previously it was believed that the only two ways it could be contracted was through getting bitten by an infected mosquito or having sexual contact with someone who has the virus. The deceased, who traveled to a Zika-affected region, had concentrations of the virus 100,000 times higher than samples of other infected people, the CDC said. The caregiver had not traveled out of the country and there is no sign of the mosquitoes that spread Zika in Utah. He noted that the continental United States now has more than 1,300 travel-related cases of Zika, and if this type of transmission is not rare, “it’s likely that we would have seen this before”.
He somehow infected another person who’d been helping to care for him. However, the exact cause was unclear because of his age and underlying medical condition. “But we do not believe that there is risk of Zika transmission among the general population in Utah based on what we know so far”.
The elderly person caught Zika while traveling to a country where the virus is known to bespreading, according to state and federal health agencies. The investigation reportedly includes additional interviews with and laboratory testing of family members and health care workers who may have had contact with the person who died and trapping mosquitoes and assessing the risk of local spread by mosquitoes.
“The new case in Utah is a surprise, showing that we still have more to learn about Zika”, said Dr. Erin Staples, CDC’s medical epidemiologist who is in Utah leading an investigation into how the infection occurred.
Officials said the second person showed symptoms of Zika, but did not have the same kind of high viral load that was present in the deceased patient. The most common symptoms of the virus are rash, joint pain, fever and red eyes. The elderly man died in June – although it’s not yet clear if Zika contributed to his death. Microcephaly, presumably caused when the virus crosses from an infected mother to the growing fetus in the first two trimesters of pregnancy, is characterized by a small head and serious brain damage. Last Friday, the CDC reported the first known case in which Zika was spread from a woman to her sexual partner.
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In the Utah case, health officials are looking for other explanations.
