First U.S. case of sexually transmitted Zika confirmed in Texas https://t.co/5zvAQep5Ln pic.twitter.com/M0wHvqtVJt
— HuffPost Living (@HealthyLiving) February 3, 2016
A person in Texas has been infected with the Zika virus after having sex with an ill person who had returned from a country where the disease was present, Dallas County health officials said Tuesday.
It’s the first case of the virus being transmitted in the U.S. during the current outbreak of Zika, which has been linked to birth defects in the Americas. Dallas County Health and Human Services said it received confirmation of the case from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Health officials did not release any details about the Texas patient, citing privacy issues. In a tweet, Dallas health officials said the first person infected had been to Venezuela, but did not detail when and where that person or the second person was diagnosed.
The CDC says that in this case there’s no risk to a developing fetus.
The Zika virus is usually spread through mosquito bites, but investigators have been exploring the possibility the virus also can be spread through sex. There was report of a Colorado researcher who caught the virus overseas and apparently spread it to his wife back home in 2008, and it was found in one man’s semen in Tahiti.