What most people don't know about the Zika virus

Most people now know about the Zika virus, the mosquito-borne virus with links to a scary birth defect called microcephaly, which has spread like wildfire from Africa into South and Central America.
The virus has been around in Africa and parts of Asia since the 1950s, but has only recently reared its ugly head in the Western hemisphere, and in the last year 42 countries have experienced an outbreak of the virus for the first time. The immediate symptoms of the virus are relatively benign: headache, mild fever, chills, conjunctivitis, joint and muscle aches, rash; and, less commonly, fatigue, malaise, abdominal pain and vomiting. Much more rarely, it can cause a neurological disorder such as Guillain-Barré syndrome. As many as 80% of those with the virus remain asymptomatic, but are still carriers.
Perhaps more importantly, the virus usually clears the bloodstream of an infected person in five to seven days, ten days at the most, after which the risk of birth defects or miscarriage in future pregnancies appears to end (and actually confers a long-lasting immunity against contracting the virus in the future).
But the potential risks to the unborn baby of a pregnant woman who contracts the virus are alarming enough to have inaugurated a worldwide panic, particularly among women of child-bearing age. For example, some female competitors are likely withdrawing from the Brazil Olympic Games later this year for that very reason, unwilling to risk their future chances of a happy motherhood.
However, what is less well known is that the Zika virus has been found in the semen of infected men, men who could potentially infect their sexual partners and thereby put their unborn offspring at risk. What's worse, it is still unclear how long Zika lasts in semen, and the indications are that this could be significantly longer than it survives in the bloodstream. Currently, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is advising men who have returned from a Zika-affected area that they "might consider" abstaining from sex or using condoms "for an unspecified period of time".
My impregnating days are over, thankfully, as are my wife's child-bearing days. Otherwise, we might be giving serious consideration to cancelling a trip to Guatemala we have planned in a month's time.

UPDATE
In late April 2016, Canada reported its first person-to-person sexually transmitted case. Time to get serious about this problem.