Officials discovered the case while reviewing death certificates, and lab tests confirmed their suspicions, said Gary Edwards, executive director of the Salt Lake County Health Department.
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Several Pennsylvania residents are known to have contracted the virus, mostly acquired by mosquito bites, while traveling overseas.
The first Zika-related death in the continental United States has been confirmed in Utah, The Guardian reported on Saturday.
Dr. Dagmar Vitek, medical director for the Salt Lake County Health Department described the incident as an unfortunate situation.
The CDC notes that sexually transmitted cases of Zika virus are not reported in areas of local mosquito-borne transmission because it is not possible to determine the source of infection.
The presence of Zika in the United States has thus far been limited to travelers returning from other nations and their sexual partners.
The virus is spreading fast on the island, infecting as many as 50 pregnant women per day, health officials said earlier this week.
The elderly woman who contracted Zika had symptoms of the disease, according to USA Today, like fever, rash and conjunctivitis. She was elderly and had an underlying health condition, according to a statement on the Salt Lake County Health Department’s Facebook page. In the case of the man in Puerto Rico, the cause of death was attributed to “internal bleeding caused by a rare immune reaction to the virus”. The unidentified resident of Salt Lake County had traveled to an undisclosed destination where the virus is circulating.
As of July 6, a total of 1,132 cases of people who contracted the virus while traveling overseas had been registered in the United States, it said.
The virus, which can cause devastating birth defects in children born to women who were infected during pregnancy, is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquito, neither of which are found in Utah.
The CDC has proposed some guidelines and recommendations to health care providers to prepare facilities and staff to respond to patients infected with the Zika virus, as well as guidelines to read primary results of Zika tests.
Nearly all were people who had traveled to Zika outbreak countries and caught the virus there.
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There have, however, been 2,526 cases of locally contracted Zika in USA territories, the vast majority of them in Puerto Rico.
