It is becoming anecdotal in the Tweet'verse that Zika virus (ZIKV) viraemia (virus in the blood) can only be detected for 5 days - presumably after illness onset - I need to chase that down.
But blood is not the only sample to test.
In fact it may even be one of the less informative samples to test if trying to detect signs of a current or very recent infection. A lot of that being done in the Americas, and as a result, in laboratories worldwide, right now.
Urine has been shown to be positive for ZIKV RNA beyond 5 days, sometimes when blood is completely negative by highly sensitive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) methods.[1,2,3] Saliva has also been of use,[4] but urine seems to outperform it for PCR purposes.
In particular - beyond 10 days in the study by Gourinat et al.[3]
From Emerging Infectious Diseases article,Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2015 Detection of Zika Virus in Urine.[3] |
- http://jtm.oxfordjournals.org/content/jtm/23/1/tav011.full.pdf
- http://www.eurosurveillance.org/images/dynamic/EE/V19N04/art20683.pdf
- http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/21/1/pdfs/14-0894.pdf
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138665321500133X