Australian diagnosed with Zika virus days after he was bit at Ubud Monkey Forest

Reports are saying that a 27-year-old Australian man was diagnosed with the fast-spreading mosquito-borne Zika virus after vacationing in Bali.

But mosquitoes aren’t the virus’ only carriers: a monkey that bit the man at the Ubud Monkey Forest, rather than nyamuk, is believed to be the culprit for infecting him with the disease that researchers say has newly made its way to Indonesia. 

The man received his Zika diagnosis upon treatment back home at the Royal Darwin Hospital. He had a fever and rash just a week after the monkey bite—though he had also been bit by mosquitoes during his Bali holiday, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. 

“Transmission of Zika virus by monkey bite or other (non-mosquito) routes, and attribution of illness to dengue or other infections, may be more frequent than the absence of prior reports suggests,” says a report in the Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health in May 2015.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with dengue and typhoid.