Zika Virus is spreading exposively - WHO

With the recent outbreak of the 'Zika Virus' responsible for birth defects in newborn, the World Health Organization (WHO) has just released a statement that the virus is now spiraling out of control.

The Zika virus is "is now spreading explosively" in the Americas, the head of the World Health Organization said Thursday, with another official estimating between 3 million to 4 million infections in the region over a 12-month period.

"The level of concern is high, as is the level of uncertainty," Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO's director-general, told her organization's executive board members. "We need to get some answers quickly."

The lack of any immunity to Zika and the fact that mosquitoes spreading the virus can be found most "everywhere in the Americas" - from Argentina to the Southern United States - explains the speed of its transmission, said Dr. Sylvain Aldighieri, an official with the WHO and Pan American Health Organization.

After first being detected in 1947 in a monkey in Uganda, Zika was most often found along the equator from Africa into Asia. Nine years ago, new cases popped up in islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Last year, the virus made its way to the Americas -- with devastating results.

Since Brazil made its first discovery of Zika in May, the number of cases there and elsewhere in the Americas has grown exponentially. The virus had been thought to be relatively harmless over the long term, but that view changed late last year.

Health authorities began to suspect a connection between Zika and neurological ailments, especially in fetuses and newborns. Brazil alone has reported more than 4,000 cases of microcephaly -- a neurological disorder resulting in the births of babies with small heads -- in infants born to women infected with Zika while pregnant.

"Zika is not a new virus," the CDC's Schuchat said. "But what we are seeing in the Americas is new."