In Brazil, the number of infants born with small brains has shown as rise, and considering the same Brazil’s health ministry has cautioned pregnant women to take extreme precautions to avoid mosquito bites. Mosquito bites could infect them with a recently arrived virus.

Some of Brazil’s famous obstetricians have in fact now advised women against becoming pregnant.

The surge in microcephaly, which is an incurable type of brain damage, has been accounted for the Zika virus epidemic, which was unknown in Latin America prior to this year.

In the United States, some Zika infections have been found in returning travelers. In a recent warning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that those imported cases will probably increase and could result in local spread of the virus in some parts of the United States.

The mosquito species that are responsible for Zika virus transmission are commonly found in Florida and along the Mexican border, but the pathogen hasn’t been detected in them so far.

According to news media reports in Brazil, over 2,700 microcephalic babies have taken birth in Brazil in 2015, which was up from less than 150 in last year. Though the surge has been hesitantly blamed on spreading Zika virus, some have said that the association wasn’t clear.

Dr. Marco Collovati, the founder of OrangeLife, a Brazilian diagnostics company that has been working on a rapid test for the virus, said, “We don’t know if it’s Zika or if it’s combination of Zika, dengue and chikungunya. Maybe a woman was infected by dengue a year before, and now is pregnant and gets Zika. The baby gets microcephaly and is like vegetable for rest of life”.