Zika Survives In Semen for Two Months

Zika persists for months in semen:

The British man was infected with the virus while traveling to French Polynesia in 2014. Follow-up testing of the man found traces of viral genetic material in his semen 27 days and 62 days after he first reported symptoms of the infection, which included fever, lethargy, and a rash. The findings appeared Friday in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

This would almost assure that it will become an STD common to the gay and promiscuous populations. It could be a significant selective pressure in a world otherwise without mortality.

What I would like to know is how it will adapt to overcome immunity while it is cooking away for months in each of its hosts. This could grow much stronger over time.

Its movement is something not normally expected:

Zika, which was discovered incidentally in Uganda in 1947 in the course of mosquito and primate surveillance, had until now remained an obscure virus confined to a narrow equatorial belt running across Africa and into Asia. The virus circulated predominantly in wild primates and arboreal mosquitoes such as Aedes africanus and rarely caused recognized “spillover” infections in humans, even in highly enzootic areas. Its current explosive pandemic reemergence is therefore truly remarkable.

Something about it is changing. Has it completed its metamorphosis, or has it just begun, now that it can hang on in humans much longer?

Its association with Chikungunya makes you wonder if there is a wild reservoir species that harbors the virus, but in which Zika can only replicate in that species if it has simultaneous access to a gene or genes from a co-infection with Chikungunya. It also makes you wonder how many other RNA viruses with interesting genes may be co-incubating in that reservoir, waiting to maybe mix and match genes in their own genomes and produce something novel. Smallpox is believed to have begun as lowly Mousepox somewhere in the Nile River valley. It picked up some genetic adaptation from somewhere, probably in a mouse, a viral particle made it into a human host where it easily took over, and the rest is virology history.

For some reason, viruses which normally do not spread are beginning to spread in ways not seen before. Either they are finding the human immune system a less formidable obstacle, they are adapting to humans, or some combination thereof. As the regional weather changes along with solar activity, the resultant ecological shifts may also create stresses in animals in the wild, aiding the spread of viruses there, into species they normally would not infect, and promoting rapid mutations and maybe recombinations.

This may be a feature of the approach of resource restriction, mediated by the subtle stresses of mild shortage and the weather changes which precipitate it.

If so, once you add in modern mass global migration, a pandemic culling would seem a likely feature of the full-on collapse.