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Texas patient got mosquito-borne Zika virus through sex, CDC confirmed

Posted at 3:32 PM, Feb 02, 2016
and last updated 2016-02-02 15:35:05-05

DALLAS — Dallas County Health and Human Services in Texas said it has received confirmation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that a case of the mosquito-borne Zika virus was transmitted through sexual contact this year. The patient, the county says, “was infected with the virus after having sexual contact with an ill individual who returned from a country where Zika virus is present.”

Previously, there have been only two documented cases linking Zika to sex. During the 2013 Zika outbreak in French Polynesia, semen and urine samples from a 44-year-old Tahitian man tested positive for Zika even when blood samples did not.

Five years before that, in 2008, a Colorado microbiologist named Brian Foy contracted Zika after travel to Senegal; his wife came down with the disease a few days later even though she had not left northern Colorado and was not exposed to any mosquitoes carrying the virus.