The Zika virus may spread in sweat and tears in some cases, doctors cautioned Thursday.
The case of a Utah man who infected his adult
son before he died leaves no other alternatives, the team at the
University of Utah School of Medicine said.
And — more bad news — the 73-year-old patient
who died really was not very sick before he caught Zika, which suggests
that the virus can occasionally kill people who are not frail and ill.
This is what a Zika rash looks like. Amit Garg, MD / Department of Dermatology, Hofstra Northwell School of Medicine
Dr. Sankar Swaminathan and colleagues describe the case in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The patient, who died in July, was the first in the 50 U.S. states
to be killed by Zika. He'd been treated for prostate cancer but wasn't
especially ill from that, the team wrote in their report. Related: Congress Finally Passes a Zika Spending Bill
"Eight days before admission, he had returned
from a 3-week trip to the southwest coast of Mexico, where Zika virus
transmission had been reported. He was well during his trip but reported
being bitten by mosquitoes," the team wrote.
He developed muscle aches, diarrhea and other
symptoms. The team thought he had dengue, a virus very closely related
to Zika that's spread by the same mosquitoes.
He died from respiratory and kidney failure four
days after being infected, they said. Later tests showed the older man
in fact had Zika, and had an extraordinary amount of the virus in his
blood — thousands of times more than usual. He'd had dengue in the past,
but not recently.
Then his 38-year-old son got sick, and developed the rash that's characteristic of Zika infection.
"Patient 2 reported having assisted a nurse in
repositioning Patient 1 in bed without using gloves. Patient 2 also
reported having wiped Patient 1's eyes during the hospitalization but
reported having had no other overt contact with blood or other body
fluids, including splashes or mucous membrane exposure," the team wrote.
Related: Zika Virus Mystery — How Did Man Infect His Son?
The younger man had not traveled, and the
mosquitoes that spread Zika are not found in Utah. Investigators spent
weeks trying to figure out how he got infected.
"Given the very high level of viremia in Patient
1, infectious levels of virus may have been present in sweat or tears,
both of which Patient 2 contacted without gloves," Swaminathan's team
concluded.
That's known to happen with Ebola, a different
type of virus. When patients got extremely high levels of the virus in
their blood, even their sweat became infectious to others.
