But experts caution that there's no reason to panic.
For a healthy grown-up who isn't pregnant, Zika doesn't pose much of a threat. Common symptoms include fever, joint ache and a rash with small red spots. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put it pretty clearly: "The illness is usually mild... Severe disease requiring hospitalization is uncommon. Deaths are rare." Compare that to Ebola, which comes with vomiting and unexplained bleeding and killed more than 11,300 people in the recent West-Africa outbreak, and you'll see that Zika isn't quite that bad.
All that is not to say that Zika is completely harmless. The virus has been connected to an exceptional high number of babies born with microcephaly in Brazil. In the most recent Zika outbreak, around 4,000 newborns were diagnosed with the birth defect. Their skulls are smaller than those of healthy babies, which leads to brain damage.
"The connection between Zika and microcephaly isn't 100 percent proven yet, but very likely," Schmidt-Chanasit said. "Evidence is accumulating by the hour." How exactly a mother can pass the virus on to the fetus is still unclear. Once the baby is born, Zika can be transmitted through breast-feeding. Some countries in South America have already advised women to delay getting pregnant until 2018.
The risk is only high if the virus is contracted during pregnancy. Women who travel to Brazil now and get pregnant two months later, for example, don't need to worry, Schmidt-Chanasit said, because the virus can't survive in the human body for long.
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