State epidemiologist, Dr. Dirk Haselow says the dept. of health has begun testing in the last few months for the virus through blood and urine samples, recently including testing for antibodies to the virus. “There’s a lot we don’t know about Zika virus and we are still doing a lot of investigation to determine whether Zika can be spread from person to person”.
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Dr. J. Erin Staples, Medical Epidemiologist, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks during a news conference Monday, July 18, 2016, in Salt Lake City. CDC officials are helping Utah experts investigate the case.
A family contact of the first Zika-related death in the US has contracted the Zika virus, but apparently not by a mosquito bite or through sexual transmission, according to state and federal officials.
This makes the eighth confirmed Zika Virus case in Utah.
Federal and state health officials said on Monday it is not clear how the individual contracted Zika, a virus that is most typically transmitted by the bite of an infected mosquito and occasionally through sex with an infected person.
A statement from the CDC said the older man’s blood contained 100,000 times more virus than is normally seen in Zika infection.
Zika is spread primarily through the bite of an infected Aedes aegypti or Aedes albopictus mosquito, which is also responsible for diseases like dengue fever and chikungunya.
An elderly Utah man who died after contracting Zika from travel overseas may have spread the virus to a family contact who did not leave the country, raising troubling questions about a possible new route of transmission of the mosquito-borne virus, state and federal officials said Monday.
“We are a mobile society and people travel to areas where Zika may be prevalent, so we may see more cases in our community” Turner said.
He said it will be important to know whether the family contact of the deceased man had any skin lacerations or skin disease that might have allowed the virus access to the patient’s blood.
“We know that the patient had contact with the deceased patient while the deceased patient was very ill”.
The study “indicates that duramycin or similar drugs could effectively reduce or prevent transmission of Zika virus from mother to fetus across both potential routes and prevent associated birth defects”, said Pereira. In addition, 14 cases likely resulted from the sexual transmission of the disease and one was the result of exposure in the laboratory, says the CDC. He had another health condition, which health officials have not identified, and it is unclear if Zika played a role in his death. It’s not known whether the elderly man died from Zika or other comorbidities.
The primary mosquitoes known for carrying Zika are not present in Utah, Edwards noted. “The exact nature of that contact, we are still investigating”, Edwards said. Some individuals with Zika never exhibit symptoms, according to the CDC.
The virus causes only a mild illness in most people. Dunn said public health specialists are conducting additional interviews and testing of family members who may have come into contact with the patient.
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Officials emphasized that the Utah case is unusual. Zika has spread through sexual contact in the United States in a small number of cases. The virus is primarily transmitted by infected Aedes species mosquito, which is not now found in Washington.
