Zika virus Affect Male Fertility

Zika virus is known to affect the baby and female reproduction, but new evidence suggests that an infection of the virus can also affect male fertility.

There is an evidence that Zika laden aecara transmitted sexually from one person to another, and the virus can survive in the semen and sperm for months. But whether it can also affect fertility and reproductive tract in men?

Dr Michael Diamond, a professor of medicine, molecular microbiology, pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and his team tested it on mice.

In the journal Nature, they reported how Zika affect fertility of male mice reproductive health and further damage is more severe than imagined.

Diamond conducted extensive studies of the reproductive organs of male rats and found the virus making sperm damage major organs, such as stem cells which is the parent of sperm in men. Testes in infected mice also smaller compared with non-infected animals.

Zika effects in male rats is two-fold. First, the architecture where early sperm cells and Sertoli cells in the testes, and the seminiferous tubules, which serves as a conveyor belt in which the sperm cells have not yet mature enough to pass as they have received the proper hormone to expand and mature.

The virus also affects sperm stem cells, which are cells that produce all sperm grandfather. In essence, Zika inhibit sperm-making process by producing fewer sperm, and the sperm interfere with the development of several new releases.

"In mice, the damage caused by Zika cause not only loss of architecture but a decrease in sperm count, loss of fertility hormones and eventually decline," said Diamond.

When an infected male mice mated Zika, they tend to excrete less than uninfected.

Is Similar damage occurs in the testes of men infected with Zika unclear. But the results raise awareness of the need to study men as in women and infants infected with the virus.

"These results show that if [the effect] that the same occurs in men, we may need to treat men more aggressive than we think," he said.

Until now, the management of Zika in men mostly focused on preventing transmission of the virus.

"However, if it turns out Zika cause more damage to the male reproductive, then we should be more aggressive about treatment in men, not only interfere with sexual transmission but to prevent damage to their reproductive organs," said Diamond.

More research is also needed to better understand how Zika affect male fertility. His group is working in collaboration with researchers in South and Central America, where Zika is endemic, to begin investigating how the infection affects male fertility. The scientists plan to track such things as the level of sperm count, motility and testosterone to see if the changes they found in mice also occurs in men.