Federal health officials say they are confident that Zika has not become airborne, although they don’t know how a Utah resident got the virus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is assisting Utah officials in investigating how a person contracted the Zika virus after caring for an elderly family member who picked up the virus in another country and died due to complications from the virus. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the patient was the man’s son.
CDC officials attempted to tamp down any concerns that the virus is airborne. Currently Zika is spread primarily via mosquito bites and rarely through sexual transmission.
“In our line of work, nothing is ever truly off the table,” said Michael Bell, an epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during a call with reporters Monday. “It would be extremely, extremely unlikely for something like that to occur.
“We don’t have evidence that Zika can pass from one person to another through sneezing, coughing,” he added.
The patient, who has since recovered from the virus, has not traveled recently to an area where the virus is spreading and didn’t get it through sexual transmission.
The dead patient got the virus after traveling to an area where it is spreading via mosquito bites. So far no one in the U.S. has gotten Zika from a mosquito bite.
The CDC added that the dead patient had an extraordinarily high amount of Zika in his blood, more than 100,000 times higher than seen in other samples.
The mosquitoes that spread Zika — Aedes aegypti and Asian tiger mosquitoes — don’t live in Utah. However, health officials are collecting and testing local mosquitoes to make sure they don’t have Zika, said Robert Wirtz, CDC microbiologist.
“We never take anything off the table,” Wirtz said. “Right now we feel that transmission by Aedes mosquitoes is highly unlikely.”
