Zika Virus May Spread Through Sexual Contact

It comes as Spain reported yesterday that a pregnant woman who had returned from Colombia had been diagnosed with the Zika virus, in the first such known European case.

“We have to ensure Florida is prepared and stays ahead of the spread of the Zika virus in our state”, Gov. Rick Scott said in a news release.

While we can all agree that we’re not going to go around sleeping with our feverish and rash-covered friends and partners, the scary thing here is that no one really knows how long Zika can stick around in semen. Lee, Hillsborough, and Santa Rosa counties are also affected by the warning.

In Florida, Scott gave the agriculture department authority to spray for mosquitoes in the counties covered by the emergency. DCHHS said Tuesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the second Zika diagnosis, while the county health department confirmed through a follow-up interview with the patient that the virus had been sexually transmitted.

“Travellers infected with Zika have entered Europe but the disease has not been transmitted further, as the mosquito is still inactive”.

Governor Andrew Cuomo of NY expanded free testing for Zika on Thursday to include all pregnant women who have traveled to affected regions and issued a statewide health advisory to coordinate efforts against the disease.

One of the cases was in 2015, the other two were in 2016.

The CDC has also issued a travel alert for pregnant women to postpone travel to 29 countries in the Caribbean, Central and South America.

On February 13, about 220,000 Brazilian armed forces will take part in a campaign to fight the spread of the virus, Rousseff said.

Scientists said that having so little to work with is hampering their ability to track the evolution of the virus. It wasn’t believed to cause any serious effects until past year; about 80 percent of infected people never experience symptoms. “I would caution that the mosquito that bears the Zika virus lives in this area”.

The Zika virus was discovered in Uganda 1947, but the first confirmed case of the virus in the Americas wasn’t until it was discovered in Brazil this past May. Zika has led to reports of microcephaly in infants ad other “poor pregnancy outcomes”, according to the CDC.

Gonzalo Vazquez, an environmental science researcher at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, said any transmission beyond Florida is likely to remain tightly contained because most tourists returning north aren’t likely to be bitten by any mosquitoes during the winter.

“We want to make sure that we have got a strategy to try to limit the spread of this disease when that happens”, said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.