Zika Virus: Can Infectious Disease Spread Through Sex? Two Possible Cases Alarm Doctors

There's a possibility that the Zika virus could be spread through sexual contact, however; the CDC says the two cases only suggest a “theoretical risk” of sexual transmission. The NY Times reported how French scientists study an unidentified 44-year-old Tahitian man, exposed during an outbreak of Zika virus in French Polynesia and they found high levels of the virus in semen samples taken from the patient, even after it disappeared from his blood.

"It is mainly transmitted through mosquitoes. The Zika virus can also be sexually transmitted, but that's not what usually happens. One issue however is that the majority of those infected will never get ill and don't know they're carrying the virus. That makes the sexual transmission a little more likely,” Professor Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit, a doctor and virologist at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg said.

He added about the mosquito-borne disease, "you can't catch Zika in the ways that Ebola spread [in western Africa]: touching or kissing an infected person or via pathogens transmitted through the air. We shouldn't compare Zika with HIV or Ebola, so people don't get the wrong idea and spread hysteria by saying Zika is the new HIV. Zika is clearly a mosquito virus. It has adapted to mosquitoes and is usually not in contact with humans in its natural environment, the jungle. Unlike HIV, it hasn't adapted to humans and to being transmitted from one person to another."